Tata-owned grocery delivery platform BigBasket is planning to roll out its own quick food delivery service in 2025 to compete with Swiggy’s Bolt, Zepto Café and Blinkit’s Bistro. The company will also start medicine deliveries via Tata 1mg next year, said CEO and co-founder Hari Menon.
The forays come at a time when quick commerce companies are entering new sectors to push up average order values (AOVs) and improve their profitability. After the rise of ten-minute grocery delivery, initiatives like rapid food and medicine deliveries are now catching on.
Fifteen-minute food delivery, in particular, has quickly become a mainstay for quick commerce players. Both Zepto and Blinkit have launched their own quick food delivery apps Café and bistro, respectively. Similarly, Swiggy has launched Bolt – which is now present in 400 cities.
High demand has also incentivised companies like Ola, and Magicpin, to join the race, alongside hyperlocal startups like Zing and Swish.
“2025 is ambitious (as it should be). (BigBasket will be) expanding to over 30,000 items to all Tier 1 cities, launching pharma deliveries with Tata 1mg, (and) rolling out food delivery of your favourite foods,” Menon said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
To be sure, Swiggy was the first quick commerce player to start delivering medicines. The firm started out with basic over the counter (OTC) medicines such as pain relief sprays and others through Instamart, before partnering with PharmEasy to expand its assortment. Since then, rivals Blinkit and Zepto have also hopped on the medicine delivery bandwagon.
Quick commerce, despite being less than four years in existence, has become a $5.5-billion industry, thanks to users who are now opting to purchase from rapid delivery platforms, instead of kiranas and legacy e-commerce websites like Flipkart and Amazon.
Due to the high demand, BigBasket pivoted to focus completely on quick commerce in 2024. The company fully transitioned to focus on quick-commerce in October, promising flat 10-min deliveries across all cities it operated in.
The Tata-owned firm has also been expanding its categories at a rapid pace this year, and now offers over 30,000 SKUs, Menon said. In September, the company had made an entry into the consumer electronics category, starting with iPhones. During the month, it sold as many as 10 iPhones a day. The company also partnered with Croma and Tata Cliq for category expansion in electronics and fashion, respectively.
The company also made improvements in its delivery time; as many as 90 per cent of BigBasket orders delivered in tier 1 cities were done in two hours, up from 60 per cent previously, the CEO added.
However, Instamart still remains the fastest quick commerce player with an average delivery time of 8 minutes, outpacing competitors Zepto at 9 minutes and market leader Blinkit at 11 minutes, according to a recent report by JP Morgan.
Like many of its competitors, the festival season drove a lot of sales for BigBasket in 2024. The company sold 20,000 gold coins during Akshay Trithiya, and the same number of Christmas trees in one day in the lead up to the holiday.
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