Ola's grocery delivery venture; to enter sector via ONDC, captures 30% of food orders on network

In collaboration with government backed Open Network for Digital Commerce, Bhavish Agarwal led Ola is all set to launch grocery delivery platform over the next few days, reported Moneycontrol.

As per the report, Ola has also become the second biggest buyer-side platform after Magicpin in the food category. The ride-hailing app has clocked in 15,000-20,000 food orders per day, capturing almost a third of the demand in key markets like Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru.

"Ola enables more than 30 percent of ONDC food orders in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR, in its efforts to capture significant market share of the online food ecosystem in the immediate term. Further, it is also leveraging its core expertise in the logistics domain by offering EV-based logistics services at a highly competitive price to smaller sellers on the ONDC network," a person aware of the developments told Moneycontrol.

Grocery delivery by Ola

Meanwhile, grocery delivery is not a new domain for Ola. As per Moneycontrol, ride-hailing startup Ola launched a standalone online grocery store in Bengaluru in July 2015. Prior to that in March, Ola had launched a food delivery app via which its cabs and drivers could deliver groceries between 9 am and 11 pm. However, nine months later, it shut both Ola Store and Ola Foods without going into detail.

Again in 2021, Ola ventured into online grocery delivery again through Ola Dash and launched its services across Mumbai and Bangalore with almost 15 dark stores. A year later, Ola shut down Ola Dash and suspended operations of all its dark stores.

Finally Ola joined ONDC last year to provide food delivery services.

"Our partnership with ONDC is going strong, and we have been able to achieve an incredible 10X growth in the last few months alone. We will continue to leverage the ONDC platform to explore and unlock opportunities for our next phase of growth," an Ola spokesperson told Moneycontrol.

ONDC's performance

ONDC is estimated to cross 10 million transactions — including mobility and retail — for the first time in June, representing a 5x growth year-on-year. In May, the network has hit a fresh peak of 5 million retail orders as compared to 3.59 million in the previous month. As per Moneycontrol, the government-backed network also saw an all-time high of 200,000 retail transactions in a single day during the month

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