The Freshness Game Changer

How BigBasket achieved customer confidence on freshness, quality, and price point with a slew of corrective measures.

- SHUBHAM DASGUPTA

Fruits and vegetables are part of daily diet. The products are perishable, and hence vendors, right from unorganized wholesale markets to organized retail showrooms, are running ahead of time to provide the freshest produce possible. Vipul Mittal, National Category Head - F&V, BigBasket, opines on how the food aggregator platform has achieved customer confidence on freshness, quality, and price point with a slew of corrective measures.

Calculating the Right Price

The foremost challenge of unorganized F&V business is price discovery. Prices are decided daily in every market and fixing the right buying price from farmers to consumers’ needs elimination of unnecessary intermediaries. To streamline this segment, BigBasket runs apps that capture prices in the markets they are available in. This is then used with technology to triangulate prices across other markets to ultimately derive the right buying price from farmers. BigBasket’s collection centers reach small and marginal farmers and their digitized screens transmit prices directly to farmers, thus preventing price leakage.

“The traditional vegetable and fruit supply chain will typically have 3-5 intermediaries from the farm to customers’ doorstep. Here, it’s only the farmer, us, and the consumer. We buy from farmers, ship the produce to the distribution centre which delivers to households. By virtue of that, we are able to give a better price to farmers and charge customers much more reasonably,” said Mittal.