Toys, gifts, printouts, passport photos: What Swiggy Instamart will ...

Launched in the middle of the pandemic in August 2020, Swiggy Instamart, the food delivery app’s grocery platform, has completed two years. A lot has happened during this time, with the promise of 10-minute deliveries attracting billions of dollars in venture funding across the world. But with the dust settling on a period of excess in the tech start-up ecosystem, the definition of 'quick' in quick commerce has changed, with delivery times getting longer across metros. Instamart was one of the players that didn't jump on to the 10-minute bandwagon. Swiggy Stores, the company's first iteration of grocery delivery, was junked after the marketplace model of delivering groceries encountered operational challenges. The next step was to experiment with the dark store model. These stores typically resemble conventional supermarkets, except that they are open to online orders only. They cater to customers within 3-4 kilometres in urban areas as delivery executives ride to and fro, fulfilling quick needs like groceries, packaged snacks, beverages and more. Eventually, all quick commerce companies have adopted this so-called dark store model. In the past 24 months, Instamart has expanded to 25 cities and catered to nine million users. Moneycontrol sat down with Karthik Gurumurthy, senior vice president at Swiggy, to talk about the road ahead and the trends in the sector.

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