BigBasket, Grofers hiring thousands of delivery, warehousing staff as order volume surges

BigBasket has hired at least 5,300 people mostly across its warehouse and delivery teams since February

Online grocery delivery and logistics firms have been aggressively looking to ramp up their employee count with additions across technology, operations, warehousing and last mile logistics as sales soar owing to the second wave of the pandemic.

While BigBasket has hired at least 5,300 people mostly across its warehouse and delivery teams since February, rival Grofers claims to have added over 2,000 people for these segments since the beginning of the year.

"Over the next 12 months we aim to add over 500 people across our tech, product, data sciences, supply chain operations, product and growth marketing, category management, and central growth team which will be responsible for enabling various parts of the business," said a Grofers spokesperson.

Over and above these staffers, Grofers has also added 390 people on its payroll across multiple functions. The company is also looking to expand this number with more hirings in the technology as well as warehousing space.

Logistics service providers such as Rapido that counts BigBazaar, BigBasket and Reliance Retail among its clients has also added over 60 people across multiple roles such as technology, product and data in the last couple of months and plans to rope in at least 50 more in the coming months.

While Grofers did not disclose the salaries of its warehouse and delivery executives, BigBasket said that their salaries ranged between Rs.18,000-30,000.

BigBasket has witnessed roughly 30 percent increase in the order value.

"The demand is clearly much higher but our ability to deliver has gone up 30 percent from February to May," T.N. Hari, chief people officer at BigBasket told Moneycontrol adding that the company will continue hiring more people depending on the growth in the business in the coming months. "Manpower will always reflect business requirements.

Grofers on the other hand said that multiple categories have witnessed different amounts of spike. While the packaged food including ready to eat and ready to cook segment has seen an 80 percent increase in the number of orders, frozen food has witnessed a 500 percent growth since February.

Aravind Sanka, co-founder of logistics and bike-taxi startup Rapido said that in the last three weeks the company has added at least 25-30 clients for its logistics business. Even the order volume has grown by 35-40 percent since February.

Before the pandemic Rapido used to get around 25 percent of its business from logistics while the rest came from bike taxi. However in the last one year, the equation has changed with over 75 percent of its business being contributed by logistics. It delivers food and groceries to customers on behalf of its clients.

"Our hirings are driven by two major things -- building product and new categories expansion," Sanka told Moneycontrol, adding that the pandemic might have surged the order volumes but the company is expanding the employee base as it goes about launching new categories such as autorickshaws as well.

Following the rise in the number of Covid cases, multiple states such as Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan have announced lockdowns where e-commerce companies are allowed to deliver only essential goods.

This has worked well in the favour of online grocery firms such as BigBasket and Grofers as more and more customers are now resorting to buying groceries online instead of venturing outside of their homes. Even marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart who get almost 90 percent of their business from non-essential categories are seen ramping up their facilities to cater to the rise in the demand of online groceries.

Amazon did not comment on the story.

While Flipkart declined to comment for the story earlier in May, the company said it was strengthening its grocery infrastructure to cater to demand across India. Flipkart plans to further expand its fulfilment centres capacity for grocery by over 8 lakh square feet during this quarter across Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai among other cities.