Grofers Success Story: Cities, Idea, Investment, & COVID

Grofers is an Indian online delivery service and the largest low price supermarket to fulfill your daily necessities. It will help you to shop from your nearby favorite store around your vicinity and deliver it to your doorstep within 90 minutes. You can do your regular shopping like fruits and vegetables, meat, grocery items, bakery items, pet care, baby care, cosmetics, and flowers. You can also choose your timings of delivery at any given time of the day.

It was founded in December 2013 by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa and developed by Grofers India Pvt. Ltd. The company is based out of Gurugram. The name “Grofers” mainly comes from the name “Grocery Gophers”. It currently serves in 33 cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi, Gurgaon, Pune, Ahmedabad, Rai Bareily, Panipat, Jamshedpur, Lucknow, Surat, Unnao, Bahadurgarh, Chennai, Indore, Noida, Rohtak, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Kanpur, Agra, Hisar, Gonda, Jaipur, Bhiwadi, Bijnor, Nagpur, Ludhiana, Vadodara, Mathura, Aligarh, and Panchkula. The company had received interest from many big investors like Tiger Global, SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, etc.

Applications like Grofers had made our life easier by delivering the daily necessary items to our doorstep within minutes. Those who want to eat healthily, but do not have time to visit the market can be highly benefitted. It had reached great popularity by providing us with a variety of goods which is required every day.

The founders, Saurabh and Albinder, happened to interact with each other when they used to work for Cambridge Systematics in the late 2010s. They made a business plan of getting into the field of grocery delivery service. The main target of both of them was to resolve the problems related to the disorderly style of the sector from both ends, i.e. customers and merchants. The problem had thus led them towards the Grofers business model. The first trial of Grofers took place in Delhi NCR and eventually after it had achieved success, it got launched in the other cities as well.

Earlier, Grofers initially aimed the attention in the delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables, groceries, bakery items, pet care, baby care, and personal care products, kitchenware, home, and office needs, mobiles and accessories, flowers, books, electronics, etc. Now, the company serves its customers with all the indispensable daily needs focusing both on the customer as well as merchant end.

Though it seemed to be problematic for the company to build a connection among the consumers and sellers but slowly and gradually, they had won over the trust of the customers by delivering good products and on-time delivery and built an alteration in their manner of shopping. Also, it had helped those retailers who were unable to sell their products due to the establishment of a lot of shops in a particular area or due to the lack of proper business orientation.

For example, Grofers became partners with Raju stores, a neighborhood grocery store and the company had become the pillar since the store was facing an extreme loss due to coronavirus pandemic. The company had therefore helped the store by delivering the products the customers are ordering from the shop and also, his store reached an e-commerce platform which helped his store gain popularity. Now, the owner does not even need to worry about the delivery services as well since the company deals with it. Like this, the small-scale businesses are taken forward and given a podium to raise their business.

Initially, Grofers worked as a hyper-local delivery service and made partnerships with the local businesses which needed an online platform to work and reach the consumers. It was just a logistics business during this point in time. Later, things started getting better and they had brought in a variety of goods and tried to help others and build good communication and now, Grofers is what it is.

Grofers are giving a platform for offline sellers to come online which helps the consumers to shop anything from their nearby favorite store and receive them at their doorstep according to their time. Now, people who are working from home or are too busy to visit the market can be helped out with few taps. People have hugely started supporting and appreciating their services and it had received a lot of positive reviews. Almost, Grofers receives 2000 orders in a single day.

Grofers was one of the online grocery delivery services which continued to serve their customers during the Coronavirus global pandemic. This helped the company achieve great prosperity in its business since people were unable to go out of their homes and get access to the marketplaces.

According to the reports, Grofers is interested in going public in either 2021 or 2022. One of the founders of the company, Dhindsa also stated, "Our path to profitability has accelerated during the lockdown, and after achieving operational profitability in January, we are on track to become EBITDA and cash positive by the end of this year. We are observing market sentiments and aim to hit the capital market by the end of 2021."