Description
For some years now, many online grocery platforms are trying to supercharge our huge kirana ecosystem. The likes of udaan, Shopkirana, Jiomart, and a few others immediately come to mind. All of them are offering a full suite of solutions that is helping small retailers to tap into a wider consumer base and transform into modern convenience stores.
One such start-up providing complete business-in-the-box solutions to over 2,50,000 kiranas is the Bangalore-based e-B2B grocery platform Jumbotail. Read our cover story (pages 24-33) that weaves a rich tapestry of its grocery retail journey along the seven years of its operations.
In 2015, when the whole world and their uncle were going crazy after B2C online grocery start-ups, two former classmates from Stanford university – Ashish Jhina and Karthik Venkateswaran – made a counter-intuitive move and launched their online B2B marketplace for food & grocery.
Today, the seven-year-old Jumbotail is worth Rs. 2,262 crore in gross merchandise value with operations spread across 50+ major cities and towns. The company has now grown into a pan-India B2B e-commerce platform that offers a complete suite of go-to-market services for brands looking to reach the kirana market, thus shaping both retailer demand and consumer demand.
Our other big story in this issue shines the spotlight on the processed food category (pages 40-51). Recent years have seen processed food gaining more shelf space in a majority of retail formats. Improvements and better reach of food retail is supporting the growth of organic, fortified, functional and better-for-you types of processed food products. Brands that want to tap into this fast-growing market will need to innovate to meet the demands for healthy ingredients and more flavours.
