India: HP techie starts portal to sell vegetables

RK Venkatesan, an engineer from Hewlett-Packard, has found a new avenue for his technical skills. He has started 'Veggie Bazaar', a web portal to order and buy vegetables, and get them delivered to home on 24-hour notice. Initiated in Chennai earlier in July this year, the portal has so far registered 3,000 users and made 7,000 deliveries so far at an average of Rs 200 per order.

“We plan to take this to other cities soon," said Venkatesan. Through internal accruals from family, he invested Rs 45 lakh in Veggie Bazaar. “We target a turnover of Rs 1.5 crore for this year, 40 per cent from enterprises and 60 per cent from home customers.” By enterprises, he referred to hotels and restaurants, IT companies and schools with which the company is in talks for possible tie-ups.

“These institutions have to work out their payment model. We plan to introduce a system of serving salads every lunch for employees of IT parks and students of schools," he said said. The Bazaar doesn't have a retail presence, but has established 'pick up' points in two IT parks in the city, and aims to extend the same to six more IT parks within this financial year. These are points from which customers can pick up their orders.

For its delivery model, it has a workforce of 30, and is in the process of deploying a hub and spoke system with trucks and two wheelers, similar to the pizza delivery model.


Source: mydigitalfc.com

Publication date: 11/5/2009

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