Daybreak - How Flipkart Minutes became the company's redemption arc

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

For years, Flipkart has tried and struggled to scale the vertical it began to sell groceries. But as quick commerce platforms started becoming successful, the e-commerce giant could not just stay out of the game. Today, around a quarter of its business comes from Minutes. What is driving the vertical is also an aggressive expansion of dark stores and in tier-2 and a change in management affecting selection on the platform. In this episode, we look at how Minutes has made it work so far, and why Flipkart's push into quick commerce is becoming a way for it to secure its future. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Every week, Kunal Gupta, the head of Flipkart Minutes, sits down with his whole team for a two-hour-long catch-up meeting. And every week, he talks stock. Now, Minutes is the company's 10-minute delivery arm. And a category manager from the company told my colleague Nuha that Gupta goes through data on SKU's step-by-step with the category managers and directors. He also said that he had never seen a senior vice president go through. through SKUs at that level before. That kind of attention to detail is exactly how Gupta has turned Minutes into the hottest new quick commerce property in the country.

And in the process, it has also made Minutes critical to Flipkull's growth strategy. Minutes is flush with cash from its Walmart-backed parent and has built a network of about 1,000 fulfillment centers and dark stores across 130 cities and 8,000 pin codes. Actually, in the top 10 metros, it has even overtaken Swiggy Instramar and is catching up on order volumes as well, all of which is remarkable for a company that's only two years old. The category manager also said that Minutes now brings in about 20 to 25% of Flipkarts business, if you don't include electronics and mobiles. That's roughly $1,200 crore a month.

And Minutes is only getting started. Numbers from Accurus Capital, a financial advisory, show that quick commerce is expected to stay India's fastest growing segment of retail market in 2026. It's growing at twice a rate of digital commerce overall. And that makes a huge difference for FlipCard. The mobile, electronics and large appliances segment has driven the growth of online marketplaces for a long time. But that segment has now started maturing. and the next push has to come from new business lines like big commerce.

So there's a lot riding on minutes because you see, Flipkart was already very late to the 10-minute delivery race, years behind the current market leaders. But with minutes, it has started to make amends. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Traitor Rikis, and every day of the week, my co-hosting Dashramana, bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 5th of October. Karan Thornani is the vice president at Illara Capital, a brokerage firm. He explained to Noha why minutes matters to Flipkart so much.

He said it is very important for Flipkart to succeed with minutes because incrementally, e-commerce growth will be driven by QuickCommerce as consumer expectations change towards shorter delivery times. You see, Flipkart grew into a major player because of the smartphone and fashion boom. But as soon as it started selling groceries, it struggled. The platform claimed that it was overwhelmed by unexpectedly high order volumes, which strained its supply chain and app infrastructure. This strain eventually compelled a shutdown in 2022 so that it could catch up on fulfillment.

So this time, Flipkart is not taking any chances with Minutes. The manager I mentioned before said that Minutes is expanding aggressively into Tier 2 cities. They also said that Minutes is. now in more than a hundred cities, when same time last year it was only in 30 to 35 cities. And in the metros, it covers about 80% of neighbourhoods. Now, there is a method to the expansion. Minutes was actually struggling when Gupta, a flip-cut veteran, took over in November last year. Before Minutes, he had worked across the mobile wholesale and fashion segments.

The big problem at the time of Gupta's joining with Minutes was its selection. the range of brands on the platform. In fact, a senior executive told Noha that shoppers kept abandoning their cards because of the poor selection. So Gupta fixed it. He added young D2C brands and expanded Minutes premium offerings

to attract Gen Z consumers. For example, in the personal care category, Ghar Soaps, which is popular with younger cohorts of shoppers, now complement traditional brands from ITC and HUL. Blably Blue, A fragrance brand that has been trending and is only about a year old is now headlining the online perfume shelf. An inventory planning manager also told us that more drinks are being added to the platform, like Jimmy's cocktails and a lot of zero-calorie drinks.

Basically, Minutes is building up a selection that attracts customers who want both health and taste. The idea is to appeal to a demographic of 21 to 36-year-olds. These are the consumers who spend a lot on. but immediately lose interest if the platform does not carry what is trending. And the plan seems to be working so far. The average order value has gone up from 300 rupees a year ago to around 500. For comparison, Blinket's average order value, by the way, is $525 and Instamarts is $6.91. What has helped is that Gupta is not shy about learning from rivals.

You see, Blinket, the market leader, grew its range by adding brand, identified from null search. That's basically the stuff that customers searched for but could not find. Minutes has borrowed that playbook. In fact, Nooha learned that Gupta personally analyzes category search results on a regular basis. Still though, Minutes' range of SKUs is relatively small. It carries roughly 8,000 to 12,000 SKUs.

Blinket, on the other hand, has a gigantic range of 20,000 at most stores, which rises to nearer. double that in the top eight cities. Bhopesh Pankti, a former Instamart executive who is currently building a supply chain startup, also agrees with the fact that selection is one of the

most important things for quick commerce. He told us that the future pretty much depends on it. Even for Blinket, if the company has to show healthy profitability, it's the ticket size that has to go up. And that can't happen without

a broad selection, which is exactly why Gupta's takeover of minutes made so much of a difference. More on this in the next segment. We changed as a team when Kunal came in. That's what a former executive told Noha. He also said, and I'm quoting here, finally, we had a single driving force for the whole minutes piece. You see, before Gupta, decision making at minutes was a little fuzzy. This was back when Kabir Biswas, the founder of Dunzo, the now defunct Quick Commerce app, was running minutes. But there were effectively three leaders. Hemant Padri, the head of E-Cart, which is Flipkart's logistics arm,

handled the supply chain side. Kanchan Mishra handled strategy and growth for product categories. And this was, despite being the head leader, was mainly tasked with figuring out demand and marketing. He never caught the autonomy he wanted and ended up leaving in 2025 less than a year into his role. But Gupta came in as a trusted insider and because of that, he got more freedom.

He started by fixing demand forecasting. Pankti explained to us why doing that well is actually quite tough in quick commerce. You see, if a category manager gets a prediction wrong in regular e-commerce, even if the stock ends up sitting for two months, it will eventually sell. Quick commerce though does not work that way.

Shelf life is short and the area across which demand is being met is small because each dark store only has a radius of four kilometers at most. So, to help with its demand forecasting in March, minutes went to Bain and Company, a management consulting firm. Then Bain brought in Hyde, an AI startup founded by Anurud Sangha, a former executive from Palantir, which is the American Software Company. Its models are trained on historical platform data, which then, in fact, selection and pricing decisions and make demand planning more accurate.

Right now, this system is up and running. Recently, it even found out that some dark stores, despite good throughput, could not increase their selection because of their size. So, Minutes is now moving them to bigger spaces in Delhi, Mumbai and parts of Bangalore. The plan is to expand these stores that have been flagged from their current 2000 to 3,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet. Minutes now has roughly 1,200 dark stores and it wants around 1,300 by Big Billion Day, Flipcard's biggest sale, which will start in October.

The other thing Minutes is doing right now is tracking pricing. The manager from earlier told us that Minutes is going after price-sensitive customers, and that's how it's making money at the moment. According to him, the premium customers who are all right with paying more for convenience are still with Blinket. And here also, Gupta is taking lessons from competitors. The aggressive everyday low prices approach comes straight from Zepto. But the flip side of aggressive pricing also means burning cash.

So, the next step right now is to reduce the burn while continuing to grow. Currently, the platform's gross margin per order is 40 to 50 rupees. The target is 100 rupees because that is where the platform can start. start breaking even. The manager told Noha that at the contribution margin level, Minutes is still deep in the red. Now, contribution margin is basically the money that's left over from every order after the platform pays for delivery, packaging, etc. Right now, Minutes doesn't have much of a margin per order, which is why there has been news about an IPO. And what is also putting the platform in a tight spot right now is a ticking clock. Stay tuned.

In the near term, Minutes aims to be second only to Blinket in India's quick commerce market. CLSA, an investment group, said that in the 10 biggest cities, there are more than 3,500 dark stores. Blinket leads with 969, Zepto has 828. Minutes comes third with 627, followed by Instamart with 615 and Big Basket 4997. Even Amazon is catching up. Its orders on Amazon Now have doubled every quarter since its launch and it has expanded to over 60 cities. Right now, Minutes sees a window of opportunity. Instamart is still working its way out of its profitability crisis,

while Zepto is busy dealing with the aftermath of having recalled its draft red herring prospectus. The category manager I mentioned earlier said that while last year was about making Minutes a story, this year is about making it a way of doing business. He said that the app is trying to grow selection and the aim is to not simply grow from cannibalizing the main Flipkart app, which is why Flipkart launched a separate minutes app last month as a pilot. The thing is, Flipkart has been here in this position before. The former executive said that the company was just as bullish about Shopsie,

which was its platform that was supposed to challenge Misho. But now it has become more conservative. Shopsie never took off and it is now being revamped to challenge Misho and Amazon Bazaar in value commerce. The executive explained that for minutes it is all about market share and optics right now. He said, and I quote, while Flipkart is putting money into minutes, it is squeezing money out of all other categories. In fact, Flipkart reportedly put almost all of the $350 million from its last. Fundraising round in May 24 into minutes, which arrived three months after that round. And this is actually because of sheer necessity.

Out of Flipkart's many bets, only Mintra has paid off so far. Flipkart has tried to replicate the Mindra success with Clear Trip and Flipkart Health Plus, but that hasn't worked so far. Clear Trip lost $650 crore rupees in FI25 while its operating revenue was only 170 crore. Health Plus even exited the online pharmacy and healthcare space in January last year. Now, after Mindra, Minutes is what is primed to be the second success. Or at least, that's how the thinking goes. But the theory is yet to face the real test.

Flipkart is hoping to have the quick commerce platform deliver a successful big billion date. The manager told us that last year, Minutes had fewer than 500 stores when the sale arrived. This time though, it has three times that number. He thinks it might be a game changer for this festive season. And if minutes does pass the test, it will be positioned as Flipkart's next growth engine. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium

podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.