Does Reliance Fresh Direct spell disaster for other grocery e-tail?

The recent Reliance AGM saw Mr. Ambani announce that the new Fresh Direct website would be ‘scaled up’, and that the company’s retail sector has seen a whopping 30-50% growth.

Reliance Fresh and Reliance Fresh Direct website has been plagued with problems like sourcing and storage issues. With it comes the added burden of logistics and freshness issues. That however hasn’t stopped many a brave e-commerce retailer to enter grocery retail.

“Food and grocery is the single biggest opportunity in Indian e-commerce today. It’s just a question of tactical execution”, Arvind Singhal, Chairman at Technopak says.

Should other players like BigBasket and LocalBanya be worried about Reliance’s grand plans?

“There is a $370 billion market out there and a lot of headroom for everybody to grow at this moment”, Singhal says.

With the focus increasingly shifting from brick and mortar to grocery retail, many believe it’s high time for the Birla and Future Group to join the party as well. After all, why should they not get a slice of the pie?

(Image credit: Indiatimes)