Indian Food Delivery App Swiggy Adds General Deliveries

Swiggy, a food delivery app in India, will be rolling out a new feature called “Swiggy Stores,” which will include general deliveries of grocery and other items beyond just food, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Swiggy, which has a $3.3 billion valuation and calls Tencent an investor, raised $1 billion in a funding round in December. It also acquired delivery service SuprDaily.

Swiggy says it has “the largest active last mile fleet in the country and a paranoid focus on consumer-centricity” and it wants to help customers with more than just restaurant deliveries.

“The convenience of Swiggying food from your favourite restaurants has become ubiquitous. Yet, for some of our other daily needs, we spend countless hours navigating through traffic, in long queues at supermarkets or in drawing up exhaustive weekly ‘to-buy’ lists,” Swiggy Co-Founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety said. “We spend a considerable amount of energy looking for that one gourmet store or find young parents dropping everything to make a quick dash to the baby care store when they realize they are out of diapers.”

The Stores feature will be available right in the Swiggy app, and will cover everything from medicine to florists to supermarkets.

It will be rolled out slowly at first, only in Gurgaon, where the company will deliver from about 3,500 stores in the city, and where it says it has partnered with more than 200 stores in various categories, including florists, pet care and fruits and vegetables. The deliveries are targeted at being made in an hour or less.

The delivery field is crowded with competition in India, with companies like UberEats, Zomato, FoodPanda and Amazon, so Swiggy is hoping that Stores will give it a competitive edge.

“Think of Swiggy Stores as the superpower that connects you to every store, retailer or brand in the city. If you already know what you want and from what store, great!” Majety said. “Just type out the list of items and Swiggy will bring that to you. If you don’t, Swiggy Stores will also connect users to popular stores and list bestsellers for them to discover and be seamlessly delivered by Swiggy.”