One-on-One with Online Indian Food Merchant

Manav P. Thaker is a co-founder of Subziwalla, an online Indian food merchant based in Atlanta.

Welcome to the Breakroom, Manav. Your company sells authentic Indian foods online in the U.S. How big an opportunity is that?

Looking at our target market’s annual spend and size of the population, the opportunity totals over $20 billion. In actuality, the market is bigger: That total addressable market only accounts for Indians in the U.S., and neither includes other communities from South and Western Asia nor anyone outside of those communities that would be interested in the cuisine. While population growth is a big reason for this (70% growth from 2000 to 2010), the combination of a broken, fragmented brick and mortar experience, lack of entrenched providers of online Indian grocery, and proliferation of Indian cuisine in mainstream food culture has caused an increasingly unmet demand for authentic Indian ingredients.

You have a background in hospitality. Briefly, how did the idea of being an ethnic specialty grocer come to life?

My background in boutique, lifestyle hospitality has taught me everything that I know about customer experience, from service to service recovery to building a community and maintaining brand consistency through every touchpoint.

Prior to Atlanta, I was managing a chain of properties in Yucatan, Mexico, where I oversaw the entire customer journey and understood how actions at each stage affected retention.

My co-founder Sajal [Rohatgi] and I met in Atlanta and bonded over our love of food, specifically onions—a big staple in Indian food. Of course, we experienced the same pain points at the Indian grocery store: Lack of service, lack of assortment, and excessive time it took to shop, among others. We surveyed over 1,000 people online and offline to determine the size of the problem, and found that it was much bigger than just a lack of convenience. Testimonials from our customer discovery told us it was obvious that brick and mortar stores and store experience did not value the consumer. This is at the core of the problem we’re solving at Subziwalla: Valuing our consumers by providing them with value through service, quality, and transparency.

What’s one thing the food retail industry could learn by studying Subziwalla?

Authenticity through personalization. There’s no one-size-fits-all option in retail anymore. Subziwalla is catering to a niche audience, which allows us to hyper-focus on their specific needs and build trust within the community through authenticity. We resonate with both our target audience and consumers outside of the community, converting them by cultivating credibility and aligning our values with a unique understanding of the culture.

Photograph courtesy of Subziwalla

Even amid all its growth, many still see food e-commerce as a challenging proposition.

We recognized the inherent challenges associated with food e-commerce from the beginning, and we took measures to mitigate those by addressing the major variable cost drivers: last-mile, packaging, and customer acquisition. By delivering as soon as the next-day, we’re able to better group deliveries and plan for profitable routes, while receiving better rates from third-party last-mile providers. We collect and reuse packaging (after two weeks of sanitization), which has turned what has traditionally been a cost into an asset.

Our understanding of our customer has allowed us to maintain a low customer acquisition cost (under $10); we’ve done more organic outreach through Facebook groups and (pre-COVID) small intimate events while focusing most our efforts and marketing spend on retention in order to increase long-term value and evangelize our early adopters. We also pride ourselves on consistently iterating: We’ve always worked on a lean model, but we are constantly reviewing and updating processes to make sure we increase our operational efficiency. This is one of the reasons why we’ve been able to become operationally profitable.

What has COVID meant for your business?

As with most online grocery, COVID created an environment that solidified the need for our service. Our biggest competition pre-COVID was habit: Consumers had their routines and we needed to be in front of them when they were making the decision to buy groceries. That habit was broken due to the pandemic, and we were able to exponentially capitalize on awareness we built pre-COVID. We grew 1,000% at the end of March, and we have since seen a steady growth of 30% month-over-month. It pushed our roadmap forward over three years as we expanded nationally and are now shipping 75% of our selection throughout the continental U.S.

Outside of sales growth, the pandemic proved that our model and micro-fulfillment operation was scalable, which we’ll be able to execute on a national level as we expand into the Northeast and future markets.

How would you describe the profile of the Subziwalla shopper? Have you seen much “cross-shopping” among nonethnic shoppers?

We have four distinct types of customers, from students in the city to suburban multi-generational families, all with varied habits and shopping patterns. That being said, they know the products they want and there’s commonality in how they prioritize their time, the experience they expect, and their fondness for the brands and products from their childhood, whether it be something they’re longing for now or something they want to pass down like a tradition. While shoppers outside of the community are not as common, partnerships with brands and restaurants have expanded our reach and visibility among shoppers of all backgrounds.

Lightning Round

‘Subziwalla’: Can you translate? “Subzi,” means “vegetable,” and “walla,” means “seller.” In India, the Subziwalla would go to the farmer's markets in the morning and then sell the fresh produce door to door. They were direct-to-consumer before it was cool.

Fill in the blanks: I thought the toughest part of this business would be: shipping perishables, but it’s turning out to be: keeping up with demand.

Best Indian restaurant in the U.S.? Some of my favorites are Chai Pani Decatur (this will bring me back to the South no matter where I am), Bombay Frankie Company (incredible Indian burritos inside an L.A. gas station), and Dosa Hutt (some of the best dosas ever, next to a Hindu temple in Queens.

Single best-selling item at Subziwalla? Outside of fresh produce, it’s the world-famous Parle-G biscuits.

What’s the last non-food item you purchased online? As are the times, I couldn’t attend a friend’s wedding and so I bought their wedding present online.

What’s the best-kept food secret in Atlanta? Farhan Momin (@farmo), a Masterchef finalist, is an amazing chef who works magic with traditional recipes. He and his dad opened Atlanta Halal Meat & Food not too long ago, which not only has amazing cuts of meat but a great menu of Farmo’s incredible culinary creations.