Future Group to deliver milk directly to homes; fruits and vegetables grocery will soon be added to cart

Kishore Biyani

Competition is about to get tougher for hyper-local milk-delivery firms such as Milk Basket, Supr Daily and your local milk delivery man as Kishore Biyani’s Future Group is all set to enter this space, according to a report in The Economic Times.

The Future Group is all set to deliver milk at your doorstep and the service will launch in metro cities in the next two weeks and will be expanded to other parts later.

Other essentials like fruits, vegetables and grocery will be added to the cart in the coming months. This new initiative of home delivery could generate around Rs 20 lakh per store per month of additional revenue, Biyani told the paper.

Future Group’s execution plan

The Mumbai-based retail group plans to dot the country with around 10,000 Easyday stores in the range of 2,500 sq ft and plans to increase the membership base to about 20 million.

Around 1,000 outlets under the Easyday, Nilgiris and Heritage brands are getting ready to deliver milk directly to homes in the morning.

How it works?

Consumers can place orders through a mobile app. Easyday and other outlets will deliver the items within a 2-3 kilometre radius.

Milk delivery space getting tougher

Investors have been paying a lot of attention to the milk delivery space lately and ecommerce companies have shown interest in acquiring them.

Online food-delivery company Swiggy, which is looking to start a grocery-delivery business, is in early talks to acquire subscription-based milk-delivery startup Supr Daily.

Alibaba-backed Big-Basket has held buyout talks with Pune-based RainCan, Gurugram-based Milk Basket and Bengaluru-based Daily Ninja.

According to RedSeer Consulting, online milk delivery is an addressable market of USD 1.2 billion (Rs 8,000 crore). Even though delivering milk is a thin-margin business, it offers companies the opportunity to push other high margin categories along with milk to consumers, it said.

Entering the milk delivering space is part of a bigger plan for Future Group. The company is planning to to open about 10,000 small stores in the coming years as part of a strategy of growing revenue from smaller format stores to Rs 60,000 crore from about Rs 5,000 crore at present.

And milk delivery could provide these stores an extra source of income.