The Hindu Business Line : Future Bazaar plans doorstep delivery for food, groceries

Mumbai, June 27 The Future Group’s e-commerce portal — Future Bazaar — is planning to offer doorstep delivery for food and groceries from its foods retailing format — Food Bazaar.

Having launched its retailing portal early this year as a subsidiary of Pantaloon, Future Bazaar is expecting to strengthen its back-end operations to include food as an additional category. At present, Futurebazaar.com sells nearly 5,000 products listed under several categories such as consumer durables, home décor, apparel, mobiles, watches and accessories.

Mr Sankarson Banerjee, CEO, Future Bazaar, told Business Line: “Today, we have all categories except food and are waiting eagerly to enter this segment. However, it is not going to be easy as food retailing is complex as loc al sourcing expertise is needed in this business.”

In fact, the existing brick and mortar retailing format of Food Bazaar has been offering doorstep delivery format for a while but considers it as more of an ‘add on’ service rather than treating it as an independent business model.

“Today, most retailers are doing it informally but home deliveries are still not an organised service. The supply chain is fractured as regional sourcing is involved. The rice sold in South India is not going to be acceptable to the North Indian consumers,” explains Mr Banerjee.

With regional sourcing being the key to the success of the business, a central warehousing model is unlikely to work in the case of doorstep food retailing in the country.

While there have been successful doorstep delivery models of retailers such as Tesco and Fresh Direct, emulating their models in the Indian market may take a while.

“Foods retailing has to be planned in a different way. There cannot be central sourcing in this model. In such a model, the produce has to bought and sold locally. Perishable food has to cater to regional demands,” observes Mr Banerjee.With intentions of strengthening its back-end processes, Future Bazaar is expecting to tap into a ready market with its e-commerce model. “We think there is a market and intend making food a viable business in the future. But such models can only work locally,” Mr Banerjee says. Meanwhile, Future Bazaar has been working closely with the sourcing departments of all the retailing formats of the Future Group. In fact, for some categories such as electronics, it is also vending items that are not available at E-Zone, the electronics vertical of the retailer.

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