Swiggy, India’s largest food ordering and delivery platform announced a major milestone in its vision of offering unparalleled convenience to consumers across the country with the launch its new offering - Swiggy Stores.
With Stores, the Bengaluru-based food tech unicorn promises to add a new dimension to convenience by connecting consumers to every store in the city. It will deliver from stores in categories such as fruits and vegetables, kiranas and supermarkets, florists, health supplements and baby care among others. Stores will be a part of the Swiggy app.
Sriharsha Majety, chief executive officer and co-founder, Swiggy, said, “Starting off in 2014, we envisioned a world where restaurant delivery would be amazing and awesome.”
“We envisioned a world where you did not have merely a handful of restaurants that would deliver. A world without high minimum order amounts, and very importantly, where you did not need to call the restaurant every five minutes asking the dreaded question - ‘Ladka nikal gaya kya?’,” he added.
“It was a world where we could democratise 35-minute deliveries to every restaurant in the country and introduce a convenient and delightful food ordering experience for every consumer,” Majety said.
“Four years and hundreds of millions of orders later, we can confidently say we bring convenience to the doorstep of consumers across the country. Despite millions of Indians ordering food, we believe food delivery is still in its nascent stages,” he added.
“So, while we continued to build out more magical realities in the food ordering space, a lot of consumers, non-restaurant merchants and retailers were asking us when we would extend this superpower (convenience) to needs outside of food ordering,” Majety said.
With the largest active last mile fleet in the country and a paranoid focus on consumer-centricity, we began asking ourselves the same question. We realised we could bring the food delivery like magical reality and convenience to a lot of other local commerce needs,” he added.
“Just like how we democratised seamless delivery across over half-a-lakh restaurants in the country, we can democratise convenience across millions of other merchants/ businesses in our cities,” Majety said.
“Today, we take yet another giant step towards bringing consumers closer to that magical reality of unparalleled convenience,” he added.
Moving beyond food
Majety said, “The convenience of Swiggying food from one’s favourite restaurants has become ubiquitous. Yet, for some of people’s other daily needs, they spend countless hours navigating through traffic, in long queues at supermarkets or in drawing up exhaustive weekly to-buy lists.”
“They spend a considerable amount of energy looking for that one gourmet store. And it is not uncommon to find young parents dropping everything to make a quick dash to the baby care store when they realise they are out of diapers,” he added.
“What if one did not have to venture out to your local kirana/mandi/supermarket every other evening? What if you did not have to halt or plan your life around ambiguous delivery slots? What if every store in the city was accessible on your fingertips? And, what if there was an easier, more efficient and convenient way of ordering from these stores? Swiggy Stores extends the convenience of ordering food from nearby restaurants to ordering anything from any store across your city,” Majety said.
