With the expansion of Retail Industry horizontally across the globe, especially in Food Retailing and Grocery Retail, one breakthrough and pioneering concept that has caught the eyes of many business strategists is “Retail As A Service” or commonly known as RAAS. RAAS has helped the unorganized retail sector a great deal in getting more agile in their processes and leveraging years of experience and robust business processes. What started as a disruption in organized Retail market has gained substantial significance as a must-do process for any thriving Retail organization. Kirana King Retail Network Pvt. Limited one of the powerful grocery retail aggregator which has slated to grow upto 7000 stores by 2025 & thereby raised INR 7 CR from Rajasthan Venture Capital Fund (RVCF) in a Pre-Series A round. Kirana King has been successfully operating all processes across its retail Kirana Stores through the RAAS model.

Kirana King – Retail-As-A-Service (RAAS) Model

According to Mr. Anup Kumar, Founder & CEO Kirana King expresses, “Indian Grocery Retail Market with its millions of Kirana Stores still operates independently and takes care of entire business process on their own, right from sourcing to negotiating with distributors, shelf management, display and merchandise, negotiating technology in recent times increasing the turnaround time for consumers or even the digital payments. The excruciating process that demands significant man hours from these one man operated stores is simply time-consuming resulting in loosing impact at critical consumer’s journey touchpoints, lower retention, lower average bill value and a dwindling consumer base compared to the branded chains of Modern Grocery Retailing that offer these services through ‘Economies of Scale‘.”

Mr. Anup Kumar, Founder and CEO of Kirana King wanted to overcome these bottlenecks in the Kirana Ecosystem and offer a one stop solution, hence, introduced the RAAS Model which has been used by the organisation and has helped various Kirana Stores to turnaround their entire business processes and offer great deal of customer satisfaction. Mr. Anup is of the view that, “The overall grocery retail business process in unorganized grocery retail sector still amounts to more than 90% of the available market size. This is when Kirana King realised that the introduction of RAAS model would be fruitful to achieve ultimate customer satisfaction.“

Kirana King started to build their product of RaaS in Jaipur during 2017 and soon gave it an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) level shape. till October-2020 they turned around and transformed some 200 odd stores to their network of “Kirana King“. The receptivity of their RaaS based interventions at these Kirana Stores in Jaipur gave the team much confidence and the sheer willingness of their Kirana store partners to adopt, adapt and acknowledge the difference that these RaaS practices bought to their store operations.

Identifying the heterogeneity of the Indian market and the psyche of the retailers Kirana King has made various amendments to its RAAS based model to suit special business needs. Mr. Anup Kumar says, “RAAS as a business model has a global acceptance which is why we maintained its ‘Agility‘ by maintaining and respecting the Indian perspectives but also incorporated those that are not a part of the Indian market. The RAAS model has culminated into Kirana King’s emergence as a strong regional player in Western Indian Grocery Market with more than 200 stores in its Network.”

Kirana King’s USP even before they apply their RaaS techniques to their selected retailers is to “Screen and Onboard” from thousands of enquiries that they get for various kind of stores, these are for all kind of stores, some who wants to get into the transformation program or some who just want a turnkey start under their brand umbrella, the screening process which is quite elaborated involves a lot of checks and running queries, the team tries to understand the willingness of the Kirana Store owner and their psychology for becoming a “Change Agent ” themselves and once that stage arrives, Kirana King’s professional team just need to empower the retailer with the right tools and the power of Knowledge.

About Kirana King

Established in 2017, with a deep-rooted and farsighted idea of safeguarding the Indian traditional grocery market from the rapid e-commerce transformation, Kirana King has set India’s first revolutionary ‘Retail as a Service Business Model‘ for Kirana Retail segment. This model enables Indian Kirana Store owners to become a part of the revolutionary grocery retail expansion while retaining the ownership of their stores. On the other side, the model also enables consumers to avail ‘organised shopping experience‘ at their neighbouring known Kirana stores.

Kirana King is the brainchild of Mr. Anup Kumar – Founder and CEO of Kirana King, who is giving the necessary thrust for empowering existing Kirana Shop owners’ market and heralding the Kirana Revolution in the country using his professional management skills. Kirana King is the fastest growing retail company who has been addressing the challenges of existing traditional Kiranawallas. Kirana King has recently raised funds from RVCF. The organisation has been empowering the traditional Kirana stores to be a part of the next level retail revolution in India. Standing firmly on 4 strong principles of its operations – Standardization, Digitization, Centralization and Socialization of traditional kirana retail system, Kirana King Endeavours to become country’s largest Off-line Marketplace & Dynamic Alternate Commerce Platform for grocery retail.

Know more about Kirana King: www.kiranaking.com.