Farm gate to dark store at BigBasket

The operation

BigBasket buys fresh fruit, vegetables and meat from thousands of farmers every day, then packs and delivers it through 40 sourcing centres, 30 fulfilment centres and more than 600 dark stores. Two and a half million returnable crates and pallets move between those locations.

Before the platform, produce was weighed and quality checked by hand and the numbers were typed into a tablet afterwards. Labels were printed from prices that had been updated station by station. Crates left a site and nobody knew where they went.

Procurement at the collection centre

Wi-Fi scales capture the weight themselves. A scanner reads the farmer, the crate and the produce type. The mobile app walks the operator through the quality check and shows a green light when the crate is good. The goods receipt reaches the warehouse management system in under three seconds, and the payout to the farmer follows from the same record.

The eleven workflows

1. Sourcing

   At the collection centre

   1. Procurement and goods receipt
   2. Dump recording with reason codes
   3. Audited stock transfer out

2. Fulfilment

   At the centre and the dark store

   1. Transfer in with discrepancy detection
   2. Centralised labelling
   3. Packed material transfer
   4. Palletisation and putaway
   5. Bulk weighment
   6. Cycle count

3. Last mile

   Out of the door and back

   1. Delivery tracking and payouts
   2. Crate and pallet asset management

Labelling across 650 locations

More than a thousand IoT label printers run at packing stations across every sourcing centre, fulfilment centre and dark store. Each one is paired with a Wi-Fi scale and manages 25 to 30 packs a minute.

Prices and SKUs are updated once, centrally, and every printer in the country picks up the change. Nobody prints yesterday’s price any more. The automatic weight capture is what surfaced the over-packing, and the barcode on the label links a pack back to the farm, the batch and the quality check it came from. Packing stations save roughly six hours a week each.

Crates as assets

Every crate and pallet carries a QR code and is checked in and out at each handoff: sourcing centre, fulfilment centre, dark store, customer. Ageing and utilisation analytics show which ones are sitting idle and which have gone missing, and returns from customers come back through a workflow of their own.

How it scaled

From a pilot to 650 locations in under two years. A new site goes live in days. When a workflow needs to change, BigBasket changes it themselves on the dashboard rather than raising a change request and waiting.