Grofers: A Phenomenal Franchise Opportunity for Entrepreneurs

The online grocery market is encouraged by changing behavioral patterns in consumers' purchasing habits. Consumers are now more inclined towards purchasing online at the tip of the palm with the rising e-commerce.

Seeing this upward trend, many online grocery players have started offering franchises for expansion. If you are also looking for a grocery franchise, you should not miss what Grofers has to offer.

Grofers is a popular online FMCG retailer that has now moved from online to offline business. A brand like Grofers, which has a customer base of 10 million, does not need any promotion for attracting franchisees.

Why Grofers is the perfect option?

When an organized retailer wishes to enter the local market, it has to face challenges from the local Kirana store as well as others in the organized sector. While the Kirana stores have warmth towards the customer, they lack competence like the organized retailers. What is required by an organized retailer is warmth, competence, and credibility to enter this type of hyper-local structure smoothly. Grofers perfectly meets these criteria.

Today, the middle Indian population looks for discounts on grocery which the local Kirana stores cannot give. Grofers has good discounts to offer and it is now going to be locally accessible to this population with its offline stores. It gives a great discount to the customers because of its purchasing power. Grofers is a perfect combination that creates customer retention and expands the customer base.

Grofers is progressive in nature because of technological advancement. It completes its deliveries with great supply chain management.

Benefits of Partnering with Grofers

- Grofers is a single supply point. It holds optimum inventory and takes back whatever is not selling. The partner’s role would be to predict what is going to sell in the area.

- Grofers is giving access to its platform, where a partner can technologically be equipped with the inventory management system, customer management system, and other similar systems.

- It gives an overall business and marketing insight to the partner. For example, how to increase customer retention? How to build a customer experience? And how to increase the customer base?

- Grofers will provide the training to the local staff relating to how to talk to customers and how to create an experience for them. It is also taking care of the technological requirement.

- It helps in the selection of manpower but the final recruitment is in the hands of the partner.

- Grofers gives a quick breakeven of about 2 years. It is with the partner at each step from the selection of location to store setup in minimum lead time.

Requirements for Franchise Partners

Grofers believes in a mutual relationship with its franchise partners where both parties work together to achieve optimum benefits for the customers as well as the parties.

Grofers is expecting its partners to open stores that are not huge. It expects the size to be around 1000 to 2000 sq ft so as to keep close proximity with the customers. It should be in a residential area where around 4000 families are residing.

Regarding the financials, 8 lakh to 12 lakh is the expected set up cost with a franchise fee of 5 lakh. The working capital would be around 15 to 16 lakh. That makes a total of about 25 lakhs of investment.

Grofers expects a focus on customer excellence. The partner must look into customer retention and create a good customer experience. All the store operations and manpower management would be in coordination with the Grofers market.

A partner can suggest outsourcing products that Grofers does not offer like low shelf products (milk and dairy products or fruits and vegetables). Since these are very popular amongst the local stores and draw customers to buy other products from the store, Grofers does give an option to outsource and also supports the cost system.

Inventory is limited to the Grofers team to decide, but the partner plays an important role in giving insights into what is a local requirement. Each franchise is allotted a person from Grofers who helps with data analytics and maximizing efficiency.

Overall, it is undoubtedly a great opportunity to enter the stable FMCG market with a brand like Grofers.

Edited By: Vaishnavi Gupta