Bengaluru: bigbasket, (A TATA Enterprise), India’s largest online supermarket, has forayed into offline retail by opening a new technology-driven, self-service ‘Fresho’ store at Basaveshwar Nagar, Bengaluru. The store was inaugurated by 3 farmers who are a part of bigbasket’s Farmer Connect programme. The launch is part of the company’s vision to open 200 physical outlets pan India by 2023 and 800 by 2026. The Stores will offer high-quality products at extremely competitive prices.
bigbasket, a digital-first brand, has adopted a channel-agnostic approach to connect with customers. With Fresho stores, customers can now handpick fresh fruits and vegetables as well as daily essentials like Bread and Eggs which are stocked at the store. For accessing the company’s entire range of 50,000+ products, they will place the orders online and collect them at the Fresho Stores at their convenience. bigbasket aspires to provide its customers every convenient option for buying products at competitive prices and also cater to the next 500 million users who have not transacted online.
Speaking about this, Hari Menon, Co-Founder and CEO, bigbasket, said “bigbasket has always striven to adopt a customer-first approach. This is where the ‘Fresho’ stores will be gamechangers in terms of making the buying of fruits, vegetables and groceries as seamless as cash transactions at ATMs. The stores will give access to the next 500 million customers who have not yet started buying grocery online and create a new significant growth opportunity for Bigbasket. The produce stocked at the Stores is backed by our extensive Farmer Connect programme where we partner with over 30,000 farmers across the country to source fruits and vegetables directly. There is complete traceability for all fresh produce built-in our supply chain which allows us to communicate details of the farmer for each product to our customers.”
The Fresho stores merge the best of technology such as ‘Self-billing Counters’ integrated with video AI tools that enable customers to pick items of their choice and weigh them at the counter through automatic computer vision that can identify the items and generate bills accordingly. Thus, there will be a complete seamless, convenient shopping experience for the buyers at the store.
With the Farmer Connect initiative, bigbasket is not just ensuring freshness of supplies at the Fresho store, but also reaffirming that farmers are their heroes and their stories need to be told to the public. The fruits and vegetables come with a direct farm-to-table promise thanks to the initiative. When customers enter the store, they are informed about the farmer who has supplied the produce for the day. Such unprecedented accountability is not present in conventional offline outlets. The launch of the Fresho outlet at Basaveshwar Nagar is just the beginning.
