Bengaluru: Right after the Flipkart deal, Walmart India is all geared up to boost its ‘Mera Kirana’ project. The project has been running over the past four years and the company now plans to include it in its mainstream business. The ‘Mera Kirana’ project helps in modernizing the small grocery stores.
Zones are been created in the Best Price wholesale stores, which are designed in a way that they look like modern kirana store, by Walmart under the ‘Mera Kirana’ project. The goods are assorted and placed in such a manner that they serve as a model for traditional kirana store owners. Sometimes the team from Walmart also works with the kirana stores to help them out.
Best Price Modern Wholesale stores of Walmart in India serves as a model for family-owned grocery stores or traditional kirana stores. As of now, the Bentonville-based company has 21 Best Price stores in India.
As of now, mostly traditional stores are amongst the one million active customer base of retail giant. Though most of these stores are yet to be enabled with technology and this is the area where Walmart and its peers like Metro Cash and Carry Pvt. Ltd. play a pivotal role.
These companies are helping out the small retailers in digitizing the business and even considering acquisitions to aid it in digitizing retail outlets.
As reported by Mint, Rajneesh Kumar, Chief Corporate Affairs officer at Walmart India said, “We’ve seen a lot of loyalty from kirana stores because they understand that we are not just selling to them we are also helping them become modern. We’ve seen healthy double-digit growth in our membership base year-on-year.”
As per the reports of Mint, the retail giant is also planning to come up with its ‘dark store’ or warehouse in Lucknow soon. With this approach, the company is experimenting in India to come up with fulfilment centres. Notably, last year Walmart India opened their first fulfilment centre in Bhiwandi near Mumbai. These fulfilment centres will be located in warehouses operated by third-party logistics firms and Walmart will use them to serve kirana stores in the area.
“It (fulfilment centre) allows us to go to market faster and while store growth will continue aggressively, this is a complementary approach that we are building in to start serving kirana stores faster,” Kumar said.
It should be noted that last month only, Walmart India bought 77 per cent stake in Flipkart for $16 billion.
