Amazon Fresh ready to deliver groceries to Indian homes

BENGALURU: Amazon has brought its online grocery store — Amazon Fresh — to India, and it will deliver fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy, meat and other packaged food to customers in two hours.

The move comes at a time when competition in the online food and grocery space is heating up with rival Walmart-backed Flipkart also eyeing a space in the market.

Amazon Fresh, launched in Seattle in 2007, has been its flagship food and grocery delivery offering globally.

In India, Amazon had opted to reserve the launch of Fresh and instead started express deliveries of food items through its Prime Now app in Bengaluru and a few other cities.

Amazon said customers will be able to access Fresh through its main India website and app, unlike Prime Now, and the service will be launched in Bengaluru on August 23 after which it will be rolled out in Mumbai, Delhi/NCR and Hyderabad.

Apart from curating its own selection, the company will also enable hyperlocal deliveries from stores around customers in the coming days. “With Amazon Fresh, customers can experience the convenience and speed of ordering daily essentials on Amazon.in.

Now, customers can order the freshest fruits and vegetables as well as everyday grocery and get it within two hours,” said Siddharth Nambiar, director of category management at Amazon India. “We are starting this service in Bengaluru and will soon roll this out to customers in other cities.”

Amazon India Retail, the wholly-owned food retail unit of Amazon in India, will be one of the sellers on Fresh. Cloudtail, which is a joint venture between NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Amazon, is also expected to be a seller on Amazon Fresh. The company, however,did not confirm this.

The online food and grocery market in India is currently led by BigBasket, followed by Grofers, according to analysts.

While Amazon and Flipkart have entered the space, their offerings are still restricted to a few cities, largely because grocery deliveries require localised warehousing, which both the large horizontal ecommerce players do not have. Flipkart is looking to leverage parent Walmart’s expertise in this space globally to grow its share in the market, but it has not made any big moves yet.