Gone are the days when I had to visit neighbourhood Kirana shop (mom-and-pop) stores to buy groceries or street vendors to buy fruits and vegetables. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit India in early 2020, my solitary existence in Mumbai was plagued with worries about how I would sustain myself. But thanks to food-delivery apps—Swiggy and Zomato—I managed to survive. Even in the midst of the outbreak, I relied on the small local stores for my daily needs. All that changed when I moved to Pune in mid-2021. It was around this time that I tried Big Basket’s subscription service BB Daily for milk and Swiggy's Instamart for things needed urgently. Such was the impact that I now get everything—from washing powder to paper napkins—delivered right to my doorstep. While Instamart has made big strides into quick commerce since the pandemic, BigBasket, which the Tata Group acquired in mid-2021, missed the bus. The e-grocer didn’t see Instamart as direct competition when it launched. Later, BigBasket's teams increasingly saw their bandwidth get assigned to larger Tata projects like Tata Neu—the multi-purpose superapp—and the Tatas’ offline-expansion goals, shifting the focus away from the e-grocer’s core business. But by the end of 2021, the undisputed leader of the grocery-delivery space was forced to launch its own 20-minute delivery service, BB Now, as instant deliveries in less than 30 minutes had disrupted the decade-old industry. By early 2022, quick commerce accounted for about a fifth of all e-grocery deliveries in India, and Instamart alone cornered ~30% of the quick-commerce space. But the $200 million fundraise in December 2022 led by Tata Digital has put the ball back in BigBasket’s court. As the e-grocer enters its second decade, it is scrambling to find ways to innovate and reassert its dominance, and also balance the Tatas' unbridled online-retail ambitions..
