Blinkit adds 200 'dark stores' to facilitate grocery delivery in 10 minutes

Since December, online grocer Blinkit has added 200 “dark stores” that are designed only for deliveries in ten minutes. The Gurgaon-based company now plans to take the number of such mini distribution centres to 1,000 by March.

Reliance Retail-owned MilkBasket is more than doubling its warehousing capacity to almost 350,000 sq ft in the National Capital Region to cater to 150,000 orders a day, double the current order size.

Amid a surging third wave of Covid-19 cases in India, while various physical retailers and dine-in restaurants are putting on hold their expansion plans, online grocers like Blinkit, BigBasket and MilkBasket are making an aggressive push to take advantage of the growing demand for quick online deliveries.

To be sure, online grocery platforms have already been in an expansion mode as millions of Indians gravitated to digital commerce as the pandemic raged in the last two years. But the ongoing third wave in India is prompting them to be even more aggressive.

“One thing has changed in this wave is that our pace of expansion has doubled,” said Rohit Sharma, head of supply chain at Blinkit.

Blinkit operated about 300 dark stores until December; it has since added 200 more, spread over about 3,000 sq ft each. “We will double the number of dark stores to 1,000 by March,” Sharma said.

Blinkit, which operates in around 40 cities, is also expanding into the eastern region, Punjab, Bhopal and Nashik among others.

Blinkit’s rival, Tata-owned BigBasket, plans to launch BB Now, its express delivery service of delivering products in 10-20-minute, joining the growing space of quick commerce, ET had reported. Currently, Blinkit, Swiggy's Instamart, Dunzo and Zepto are active in that space.

TK Balakumar, chief operating officer at BigBasket, said his company plans to increase its existing warehousing capacity by about 40% and will open more than 300 dark stores in the coming financial year starting April. “This will lead to increasing our number of orders from the current 300,000 to 500,000-plus per day,” he said.

Online grocers said orders in various cities have gone up by 30-40% during this round of the Covid wave.

MilkBasket is currently catering to about 70,000 orders per day in the NCR. Its new 150,000 sq ft warehouse in the region will be ready next month.

“There is excess demand,” said a person familiar with MilkBasket’s plans. “They are already running 110% of capacity.”

MilkBasket operates in Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai, and is set to enter Jaipur later this month.