Grofers has now shutdown 18 location after rebranding to Blinkit ⁠— here’s how you can check if deliveries are available in your locality

Groceries delivery giant Grofers — which rebranded itself to Blinkit last week in order to further emphasis on its quick commerce image — has shut down stores and is limiting its operations to only those areas where it can deliver products within 10 minutes.

The company is operational in 30 cities, 12 of which do offer 10 minute delivery. A quick look at the Blinkit (Grofers) site shows that their services aren’t available in Agra, Ahmedabad, Panipat, Rohtak, Allahabad, Durgapur (West Bengal), and Vadodara. These are some of the cities where the erstwhile Grofers had launched deliveries in 2019. “

The remaining 18 cities were the ones where the company still offers its regular one day delivery. “The Blinkit service will now be available in only the areas where we are able to arrive at users location within 10 minutes (or less),” founder and chief executive (CEO) Albinder Dhindsa announced on Twitter.

Similarly, Business Insider also checked for some key residential locations within the big cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

These are some of the areas where either Blinkit doesn’t seem to be delivering as per the website:

Tollygunge, Kasba, Jadavpur, Bhowanipore, and New Alipore in Kolkata;

Kalina, Kandivali, Kharghar, Sion, and Andheri East in Mumbai;

Shanti Niketan, Hauz Khas Enclave, Green Park, and Punjabi Bagh in New Delhi;

Cox Town, Lalbagh, Rajaji Nagar, Shivaji Nagar, and RT Nagar in Bengaluru;

Ambattur, Velachery, Pallavaram, Perungudi, KK Nagar, Mylapore, and Thiruvanmiyur in Chennai.

In Hyderabad, the services are not available. There may be variations based on specific location or housing society that you may live in. You can add your specific location and verify if deliveries are available.

This move will impact 75,000 of the 200,000 daily customers of the company, Blinkit said.,

It is currently executing its 10-minute delivery in 12 cities through over 250 stores and plans to take this number to 530 stores by next month. It plans to serve through 1,000 stores by the middle of next year, the company’s CEO had told Business Insider last week.

However, industry experts believe that the number is simply too low. Here’s Business Insider’s analysis of Grofers’ ambitious plan for quick commerce based on an interview with Dhindsa.

The chief executive officer of a firm in the quick commerce space, on the condition of anonymity, told Business Insider, “We did some maths on our end to do 10-minute delivery in a city like Bangalore [Bengaluru], you will need close to 80-90 stores. If you have to deliver in Delhi [under 10 minutes], you would need around 300-400 stores. But maybe they [Grofers] are not operating everywhere, they are only offering 10-minute delivery to places with dense localities.”

However, Grofers is not cutting back on the inventory. It plans to offer 4,000-7,000 stock keeping unit (SKU) ⁠— simply put product range ⁠— whereas other players in the quick deliveries space only offer 1,000-1,500 SKU because it is simple to manage when making deliveries in 10 minutes.

Grofers, now Blinkit, was founded in 2013 by Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar. The company has raised close to $800 million to date from marquee investors such as Zomato, Tiger Global, Softbank and others. It crossed $1 billion in valuation earlier this year.

The company has spent over eight years building and scaling its delivery operations.. The company had decided to move out of its 90-minute delivery option five years ago, but it now believes that “instant commerce is indistinguishable from magic”.

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