Value Grocery – Unlocking India Next 100 Mn Shoppers

Online grocery has turned into a race against the clock. Dark stores on every corner, delivery riders weaving through traffic, and brands expanding their footprint app by app. But the next 100 million grocery shoppers don’t live where those dark stores are, and they aren’t paying up for a faster delivery. 

They sit in tier two and beyond. They already shop online for lifestyle, yet they still buy most of their groceries from the kirana next door. So alongside the ten minute race, there is a second one, quieter and just as large: a trillion dollar basket that speed alone will not win. 

That basket belongs to Bharat, roughly 150 million households defined not by geography but by income, with behaviours and aspirations converging fast with their higher income counterparts. As a cohort they already consume around $700 billion of goods and services a year, a number Redseer’s modelling expects to reach $1 trillion. This is a cohort no brand or platform can choose to ignore anymore. 

In this podcast, Redseer’s Kushal and Mrigank unpack who the Bharat grocery shopper really is, how their basket is changing, and what it actually takes to win a the value grocery market in India. 

Key Moments 
0:00 – The Bharat cohort no one can afford to ignore 
0:26 – Who the Bharat consumer really is
1:35 – How much the Bharat consumer spend?
2:13 – The three shifts reshaping the Bharat grocery basket 
3:30 – What Bharat shoppers look for in a brand 
4:04 – India’s grocery channel split 
4:51 – Winning Bharat grocery on selection: regional brands, private labels, small packs 
5:50 – Bringing fulfilment cost to ₹50, half of quick commerce

The questions worth asking are changing 

Value grocery is at an inflection point, and the questions worth asking have moved on from delivery speed: 

• What does the Bharat shopper actually want on the shelf, once loose staples give way to packaged goods, protein and everyday indulgence? 

• If shoppers are willing to buy a private label or an unknown brand, what is a brand really worth in this basket? 

• Can a model built for small ticket sizes fulfil an order profitably, or does the economics break below a certain basket value? 

• When kirana holds 91% of grocery spend, is online competing with the corner store or quietly learning to serve alongside it? 

The strategic question beneath all of this: as selection, localisation and fulfilment cost start to matter more than raw delivery speed, who is actually built to serve the next 100 million grocery shoppers? Value grocery players are already fulfilling an end to end basket at around ₹50, roughly half of what a quick commerce player spends. Get the shelf and the cost line right, and the trillion dollar basket is there to be won. 

Watch the full conversation to understand where the next 100 million grocery shoppers are really headed. 

Access the full report here