Founders and CEOs of food and logistic start-ups like BigBasket, Licious talk about challenges they face operating under a lockdown in a webinar organised by Fireside Ventures and TiE Delhi-NCR
The biggest lesson that coronavirus has taught the start-up ecosystem is to do more with less, said Founders and CEOs of food and logistic start-ups in a webinar organised by Fireside Ventures and TiE Delhi-NCR. Hari Menon, Founder of online grocery delivery platform, BigBasket, said that COVID-19 adversity has pushed him and his team to think differently. “Our biggest challenge was manpower. When we didn’t have manpower to deliver, we had no choice but rationalise our SKUs. From 38,000, we were forced to bring it down to as low as 2,000 SKUs in some cities. However, we upped our productivity by introducing community selling. We got people living in residential societies to consolidate their orders and place one bulk order. This helped us increase our capacity.”
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Necessity is the mother of invention, said, Vivek Gupta, Founder, Licious. The online platform that sells meat, chicken and sea-food, is known for its express deliveries. “Since we had shortage of manpower we started doing slotted delivery instead of express. Since there was a shortage of meat in the North, as slaughter-houses were shut down, we used Blue-Dart’s six hour delivery service to transport meat from Bangalore to Delhi.”
Source: Business Today
