Amazon opens up its grocery vertical ‘Pantry’ to 300 new cities

E-commerce behemoth Amazon has announced today the expansion of its ‘Amazon Pantry’ to over 300 cities in India. With this, the grocery delivery service would now be available in 10,000 pin codes across the country. 

The expansion of the service comes at a time when online grocery has been gaining ground as people are still preferring to stay inside the home with limited external activities. E-grocers such as BigBasket and Grofers have been witnessing a surge in orders since the last week of March.

“Amazon Pantry has become popular with customers as it fulfills their grocery demands and gives them great savings. With this expansion, customers in more than 300 cities & towns can get access to safe doorstep delivery of grocery essentials”, said Saurabh Srivastava, director of category management of Amazon India via a press statement. 

With this expansion, hundreds of smaller cities including Allahabad, Amreli, Shimla, Udaipur, Varanasi, Nainital, and Bhopal can order groceries via Pantry. Amazon is committing two days of delivery in these cities.

While the major metropolitan cities such as Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, and Pune have the option to select respective time slots for scheduled delivery, the same option has not been made available to other cities.

This is the second major announcement from Amazon during the pandemic. Early this month, it had announced the official launch of its food delivery business from Bengaluru.

The online grocery delivery market has turned competitive with the launch of Reliance’s Jio Mart and the debut of numerous firms including Meesho and Cure.Fit. Flipkart is also eyeing hyperlocal delivery from Bengaluru while B2B major Udaan has softly launched a consumer-facing app Pickily.

Entrackr had exclusively reported about Pickily early this month.

Foodtech major Zomato had started grocery delivery. However, the company is pulling the plug from its grocery fulfillment product Zomato Market. On the lines of Zomato and Swiggy, Amazon food delivery arm had recently forayed into alcohol delivery service from West Bengal.