BigBasket Launches 10-Minute Food Delivery Service To Take On Blinkit, Zepto

Tata-owned BigBasket is planning to launch its 10-minute food delivery service across India by the end of financial year ending March 2026 (FY26).

The company is currently piloting the service in Bengaluru and will scale it to 40 dark stores by July, its cofounder Vipul Parekh told Reuters.

The company plans to leverage its dark store network for its food delivery service. Parekh said it plans to increase its overall dark store count to about 1,000 to 1,200 by the end of 2025 from 700 currently.

Notably, BigBasket’s quick food delivery service will include menu items from Tata group brands like Starbucks and Qmin. However, it will not partner with external restaurants.

With the move, BigBasket will take on the likes of Swiggy’s SNACC, Blinkit’s Bistro, and Zepto Cafe. The cofounder said that the quick commerce platform will target customers of food delivery firms like Zomato and Swiggy, along with unlocking new customers, with the launch of the new service.

Parekh also denied reports of an external fundraise, reaffirming plans for an IPO within 18-24 months. “Being part of the Tata Group, there’s enough internal capital,” he was quoted as saying. 

BigBasket was founded in 2011 by Parekh, V. S. Sudhakar, Hari Menon, V. S. Ramesh and Abhinay Choudhari. It was acquired by Tata Digital in May 2021, which purchased around 64% stake.

The company’s business model initially centred around providing an online platform where customers can browse and purchase a wide variety of grocery items, including fruits, vegetables, packaged foods, among others. 

However, in 2022, the startup forayed into the quick commerce space with the launch of BBNow. By August 2024, it fully transitioned into a quick commerce model with delivering orders within 15-30 minutes. 

The Quick Food Delivery Boom

BigBasket’s entry into the quick food delivery sector comes at a time when players like Bistro, SNACC and Zepto Cafe, which provide beverages and read-to-eat snacks, are seeing traction for their services. 

However, the going has not been smooth for the players in the space. While Zepto Cafe hit 1 Lakh orders per day in February, it temporarily halted operations in multiple cities like Agra, Chandigarh, Meerut, Mohali and Amritsar last month.

Besides, Zomato and Swiggy also offer 10 to 15 minutes food delivery service via their restaurant partners. However, Eternal-owned Zomato shut the service ‘Quick’ recently, with its CEO Deepinder Goyal saying that the company did not see any incrementality in demand “while we ran Quick as an experiment for a few months”.

But Swiggy’s ‘Bolt’, a service akin to Zomato’s ‘Quick’, is seeing rapid growth. In its Q4 FY25 filing, Swiggy said that the quick food delivery service accounted for about 12% of its total food delivery orders. At the time, the company said that Bolt’s restaurant partners exceeded 45,000 across 500+ cities in India.

Despite this, a number of emerging startups like Swish and Zing are also trying to grab market share in the growing quick food delivery industry. Recently, Rebel Foods, too, entered the fray with the launch of its 15-minutes offering ‘QuickiES’.

Notably, BigBasket’s quick food delivery foray will further increase the troubles for Zomato and Swiggy. The companies have been facing high competition in their quick commerce verticals. The proposed entry of Rapido in the food delivery space is expected to further put pressure on the two companies.