Swiggy Axes Gourmet Grocery Delivery Vertical Handpicked

As the external market pressures continue to hurt India’s startup economy, foodtech decacorn Swiggy has closed another of its verticals for a leaner business, this time the gourmet grocery delivery vertical Handpicked.

“At Swiggy we’re continuously experimenting with new propositions in line with our vision to enable unparalleled convenience to consumers. Handpicked was being piloted in a few zones in Bengaluru and we have had several positive learnings from it,” a Swiggy spokesperson told Inc42.

Users can continue to order groceries via Swiggy’s Instamart and InsanelyGood, the rebranded avatar of SuprDaily launched earlier this year in March.

Handpicked, which was launched in December 2022, was an invite-only platform that offered premium products which are either imported or locally made. The idea was to bring a catalogue of products that were hard to find in Indian stores, offline or online, such as Coca-Cola Cherry (only available in the US) and kombucha made by local breweries.

The platform only delivered the products the next day, unlike Swiggy’s quick commerce vertical Instamart, which delivers in between 15 and 50 minutes.

At the time of launch, Swiggy had said that Handpicked would help “customers discover and purchase unique and interesting groceries ranging from global favourites to regional delights and local legends that are not easily accessible.”

Handpicked’s launch looked to have been a rational decision, given Swiggy’s incremental gains from grocery delivery. In FY22, the startup earned INR 3,444.4 Cr from the sale of services, which was an increase of 83% from INR 1,878.9 Cr in FY21. 

Of this, Swiggy earned INR 87.5 Cr by selling food, while it made INR 2,035.6 Cr by selling traded goods through Instamart.

It seems that Swiggy failed to find a good product-market fit with the vertical. The likes of BigBasket also offer gourmet products, but they have limited that to just a section within the larger product spectrum, so Swiggy might want to go down the same path.

Swiggy’s Shifting Gears

Handpicked gets axed at a time when the foodtech decacorn is playing catch up to the only other incumbent in this segment, Zomato. The listed foodtech has captured a majority of the market share and is playing with better margins than Swiggy.

As such, the foodtech has been diversifying its grocery and other traded goods delivery verticals. It recently launched Maxx, a platform that would deliver products such as toys, electronics, gadgets, and home and kitchen essentials in under one hour.

Swiggy plans to add categories such as beauty and grooming, essential clothing, gardening, furnishing and decor, and health and fitness soon, taking on the likes of Amazon and Flipkart in the process.

Be that as it may, it sold its kitchen infra business, Access, to Kitchens@ in March and shut down private label The Bowl Company in Delhi NCR late last year. Not to mention, the foodtech fired 380 employees at the start of this year in a restructuring exercise.