Retail fresh produce operations in India

Abstract

Retail is one of the fastest growing sectors not only in our country but also in the entire world. There has been a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and activity happening in this sector in this decade. A lot of new players have entered the market in the last few years. Some of them have been a huge success while many of them have seen only a moderate growth. The prominent sectors in the retail business were food and grocery and apparel. In this report, we are restricting our study to the food and grocery retailers specifically concentrating on the fresh produce. With this objective in mind, the report has been divided into three parts. The first part gives an analysis of the food retailing in India. The development, the present scenario, and the likely future of this particular section of the retailing industry are discussed in this part of the report. It has a special focus on the current and future trends of grocery retailing. The second part of the report is a study of the fresh produce operations of some of the organized retailers in India. We also have studied that issues related to perishability, inventory and pricing of the fresh produce. This helps us to understand the key success factors in their business model especially in the context of the Indian industry. The final part of our report is an accumulation of our learning in the first two parts. Here, we present a series of recommendations retailers to effectively and efficiently manage the fresh produce. The methodology that was adopted for this study consisted of two parts. Firstly, a literature study was done to identify the theoretical frameworks which can be used in the project. Secondary data was also collected during this period. In the next phase we surveyed some of the prominent Indian retailers like Reliance Fresh and Spar etc. to identify the key success factors in managing their fresh produce. We also collected the price, quality and the quantity data for various fresh produce like Apples, Oranges, Tomatoes, Greens, Onions, and Potatoes etc. We then drew a graph to establish the relationship between these parameters. A comparison of the same with the theoretical framework was done to study the gap.