Ninjacart: Rethinking fruits and vegetables value chain

Abstract

“Here, have one more”, said Thiru as he pushed another glass up Vasu’s throat. It was 8:30 in the evening and the work-spaces had converted into a celebratory banquet. The employees were busy chatting, socializing, some juggling with the drinks while others taking control of the buffet spread. The celebrations were on for Ninjacart reaching the milestone of 100 tonnes shipment in a day for Bangalore. It was a small achievement in the set of many to come for Ninjacart. Founded in May 2015, Ninjacart is an agri-marketing platform that connects farmers directly with businesses. It started as an on-demand hyper-local grocery delivery company but pivoted to its current business-to-business model in December 2015. The key to the hyper-local delivery model, if a firm did not want to carry inventory, was keeping track of the inventories at the local kirana store which in a largely unorganized market like India was close to impossible. Further the backend supply chain till the stores was largely broken. Hence, the unit economies were clearly more favourable in the B2B model. Ninjacart started the B2B model with a supply chain consisting of collection centre(s) (CC) in farming clusters across Karnataka for sourcing supplies, fulfilment centre(s) (FC) which acted like the consolidation and deconsolidation point at the outskirts of the city and distribution centre(s) (DC) inside the city for last mile delivery. The initial model had a vehicle going from CC covering two/three DCs which later changed to a model where all vehicles were routed to the FC where the batching was performed. Having experimented with two operating models, Ninjacart last month moved to a model with 2 FCs, one at each latitudinal end of the city whilst also shifting bulk of its batching operations to the origin (CC). Amongst all the models a constant that needed to be ensured was that all shops get their supplies by 8:30 AM in the morning. Ninjacart hence had to work backwards from this timeline and plan its supply chain. “We feel we can scale much better with this model, however there are still some efficiencies that could be incorporated”, commented Swapnil, a senior business analyst at Ninjacart. Evolved over time, there was generally a positive feeling about the current model being competitive and scalable, at least on paper. As the celebrations came to a close and people started heading back, Thirukumaran (Thiru) cofounder of Ninjacart, lay back on his couch wondering what else needed to be done to take Ninjacart through its next phase of growth.