Amazon Becomes First Foreign Food Retailer In India

Beating its global rival Walmart, Amazon has made it to the Indian food retail market as the first foreign company to start its food retail venture in India.  In 2017, the ecommerce giant received affirmation from the Indian government to invest $500 Mn in India’s food retail space.

Amazon Retail Pvt. Ltd. will be providing the grocery services and will start with its pilot services in Pune thereby giving competition with other leading online grocery and food retail marketplaces like Grofers, Bigbasket, Supr Daily, who received similar approvals from the government for food retailing.

Walmart which is planning to acquire a 40% stake in Indian ecommerce major Flipkart can be taken as the reaction to this development by amazon in the progressive investments in the Indian markets.

Amazon spokesperson in the statement said, it will take around a quarter for the company to completely roll out its food retailing business in the country.

Amazon has already launched Amazon Now, an app for food and grocery items home delivery to meet their instant food demands. Currently, Amazon’s warehouses in India do not store food items to meet the Amazon Now demand. With this development, amazon has achieved the direct access to the consumers.

All the major e-commerce companies are constantly vying to capture major chunk in the Indian Food space like Alibaba (recently acquired BigBasket), Walmart are aggressively trying to now eat the major share in Indian food and grocery vertical.