Hari Menon: The man who built India’s largest online grocery chain at 62

Struggling at the age of 37, Hari Menon, launched an e-commerce platform. Unfortunately, he made ‘0’ business in 1st year. Later, Menon changed his strategy and shifted to online-offline retail and merged it with an online grocery chain, “Trinethra.

Soon, the strategy worked and Fabmall expanded to 300 outlets in South India, and Aditya Birla Group acquired them. Menon realised the power of Online Grocery in 2000 when India was struggling with slow dial-up lines.

The Internet came to India, and so did Hari’s dream of starting an Online Grocery startup. In 2011, BigBasket was born. The idea was simple partner with offline Kirana shops to build an online platform offering a wide range of products.

Interestingly, BigBasket expanded to Hyderabad and Mumbai. Seeing the growth and first mover advantage, Chrys Capital and Ascent Capital invested 61 crore. BigBasket was doing 75,000 orders monthly but could not manage the demand. Menon realised it would be impossible to do without a warehouse.

So, he expanded to other parts of the country , with a warehouse in each city. The business was doing 150,000 orders monthly and had served a million orders.

In 2019, BigBasket crossed 8000 crore in sales. It finally achieved the 1 billion US Dollars valuation mark and became a unicorn. Tata Group saw the potential and acquired a majority 64.3 per cent stake in BigBasket against a valuation of 16,000 crore.

Today, BigBasket is a 26,000 crore company serving millions of customers in 55 cities. At a 40% market share, it is the leading online grocery platform despite Zomato investing 700 crore in Grofers. At 62, Hari proves that Old is Gold.

The valuable inputs were taken from the Twitter handle of Mr Aditya .

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