Structure and strategy of supermarkets of fruits and vegetables retailing in Karnataka: Gains for whom?

Kedar Vishnu and Parmod Kumar
Additional contact information
Parmod Kumar: Institute for Social and Economic Change

No 438, Working Papers from Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore

Abstract: Indian Modern Food Retail Chains (MFRC) have been growing the fastest in developing countries for the last two decades. What impact will it have on existing fruit and vegetable (F&Vs) supply chains, procurement price offered to farmers and consumers’ purchase prices? How do the MFRC expand their business and what strategy do they adopt? This paper analyses the evolution of MFRC, particularly during the last two decades. Further, the paper traces the current structure and expansion of retailing through supermarkets in India and discerns the strategy of the retail chains and price spread in F&Vs. The paper is based on primary survey and data were collected in 2016-17 in Bangalore, Karnataka. Field findings show that domestic modern retailers resort to joint ventures with other international companies mainly for utilising their international experience, expertise in brand development and retail led technological development. The authors noted that the MFRC have shifted away from the use of spot markets towards purchasing directly from the farmers for differentiating their product from traditional retailers, maintaining higher product quality, consistency and cutting costs in order to compete with the traditional players and wet markets. The paper concludes that most of the F&Vs and MFRC offer higher prices to the farmers as compared with traditional and spot market prices.

Keywords: Food; retail; chain; Supermarkets; Fruits; and; vegetables; Spot; markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-com
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.isec.ac.in/WP%20438%20-%20Kedar%20Vishn ... umar%20-%20final.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.isec.ac.in:443 (Bad file descriptor) (http://www.isec.ac.in/WP%20438%20-%20Kedar%20Vishnu%20and%20Parmod%20Kumar%20-%20final.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.isec.ac.in/WP%20438%20-%20Kedar%20Vishnu%20and%20Parmod%20Kumar%20-%20final.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sch:wpaper:438

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by B B Chand ().