Grofers to add 700 kirana stores onto network, eyes $1 bn revenue by year-end

New Delhi: Softbank-backed Grofers aims to cross the $1 billion revenue mark by the year end, helped by strong growth in both its online and offline businesses. It had started operations as an online grocery platform. Earlier this year, it had said it is working with brick-and-mortar stores in Delhi-NCR to convert them into its own branded outlets.

"In the first phase, we associated with 100 stores and currently we have 300 stores under the program and this will be scaled to 1,000 by year-end, all in Delhi NCR region," Grofers founder Saurabh Kumar said.

The plan is also to expand this programme to Mumbai and Bengaluru by the end of the year, he added.

"We are aggressively growing our business and aiming to clock USD 1 billion in revenue by end of 2019 with a significant focus on our in-house brands in 2019. Our G-brands contribute 40% to our current revenue, and we plan to increase it to 60% in the coming years," Kumar said.

He added that the distribution expansion to offline kirana stores earlier this year has helped in increasing penetration of the G-brands.