After Scrapping Food Retail Plans, Flipkart Adds Grocery To B2B Wholesale Basket

Flipkart Wholesale, the ecommerce giant’s B2B marketplace, has announced addition of grocery to its array of offerings for retailers and kirana store owners in India. Flipkart will enable wholesale grocery supply to kiranas through a dedicated fulfilment centre in Haryana’s Bilaspur.

The B2B grocery operations will be limited to Gurugram at this stage, and retailers and store owners can order products from the dedicate Flipkart Wholesale app. The company plans to expand it to Delhi NCR and other cities in the next few months.

Retailers will be able to procure staples, personal care, beverages, cleaning and laundry products, snacks and biscuits and packaged food products across over 350 brands. Flipkart claims that over 95% of the merchandise sold across its wholesale Best Price cash-and-carry stores is locally sourced.

Flipkart launched Flipkart Wholesale in July 2020 after the ecommerce giant acquired Walmart India’s B2B business. It started out with pilot operations for fashion and lifestyle products and expanded to Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Mysuru, Chandigarh Tricity, Meerut, Agra, Jaipur, Thane, Greater Mumbai and other cities around last November, ahead of the festive season.

On the other hand, Flipkart is likely to scrap its plans to launch a food retail business FarmerMart to sell directly to consumes. The company is said to have given up on the idea as it would have been difficult to drive traffic to the platform or bring in synergies with the company’s main ecommerce business.

Flipkart had been eyeing the food retail business in India since 2019, and even went to the extent of amending the memorandum of association for FarmerMart to receive regulatory approval in the food retail sector. Flipkart was hoping to source its inventory directly from growers and farmers, and provide insights to help them produce in line with the demand. The company believed that it would help the farmers get assured income on food produced. It had also conducted a pilot project in Hyderabad to deliver fresh fruits and vegetables in partnership with agritech supply chain startup Waycool Foods as well as other sellers.

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