A grocery store with a difference

16 August 2006

A grocery store chain in Mumbai is using familiarity with local customers as a strategy to keep consumers coming in, reports CNBC-TV18.

It looks like any other grocery store but if one looks closely, its staff is the local sabziwalla. Spinach uses such vendors as salespeople because they understand what the customer in the locality wants, and more importantly, they are familiar with groceries.

"In certain critical categories, where you have commodities like rice, dal and pulses, we have picked up people who may not have the best education but they can hold the rice and tell if it's new or old, or what the fair value of the product will be," said Dipankar S Halder, CEO, Spinach.

The five-month old Spinach has 10 outlets in Mumbai. Its route to the customer is through familiarity. That goes beyond hiring your local veggie vendor but also involves housewives in the area. They actually cook up a favourite dish at the store every now and then.

Before setting up an outlet in an area it asks households to fill up diaries to get a fix on shopping patterns. That dictates its inventory. So, a store in upmarket Juhu in Mumbai, will stock exotic foods, but in Ghatkopar, it would go vegetarian. And it figures this familiarity is the route to more customers.