One City, One SKU: How Gramiyaa Cracked Quick Commerce
Posted on 11th Nov 2026 11:10:43 in Business, Digital Marketing
Tagged as: quick commerce, Gramiyaa, D2C, cold pressed oil, dark stores, shelf availability, Indian e-commerce
Getting listed on Blinkit or Instamart looks like the moment a small brand arrives. For Gramiyaa, a Bengaluru-based cold-pressed edible oil brand, the listing was the easy part. What followed was a year of paying roughly twice the commission that national cooking oil brands paid, funding an advertising budget it could barely afford, and losing money on the channel for six straight months before the numbers turned.
Today quick commerce is Gramiyaa's largest revenue channel, contributing 35% of its Rs 5 crore monthly recurring revenue. The company closed FY26 with Rs 29 crore in revenue, up 61.1% from Rs 18 crore in FY25, and quick commerce alone accounted for around Rs 10.15 crore of that. Those numbers did not come from a bigger discount budget. They came from treating dark stores the way a supermarket treats its shelves, and from measuring availability in individual pin codes rather than at the level of an app.
Here is how the brand built that channel, what it cost, and what smaller sellers should copy before they sign their first quick commerce contract.
From a Chennai Oil Mill to a D2C Brand
Gramiyaa did not start as a startup. Co-founder Sibi Manivannan's grandfather ran an oil mill, and the family sold unbranded oil in PET bottles through five or six retail shops in Chennai. Those shops brought in Rs 15-20 lakh a month, but high rents and operating costs ate into the earnings, and each store could only serve its immediate neighbourhood.
In 2022, Mohamed Yaseen and Naveenrajamaran RL joined Manivannan and the three built a new company. They started with a website, set up small warehouses across four metros to deliver within a day, and tapped distributors serving the Indian diaspora in the United States, which gave them a small but high-margin revenue stream.
Their own website, however, could only attract so many buyers for a single category like cold-pressed oil. In November 2022 the brand listed on Amazon. That brought reach but also an unexpected trade-off: customers who used to buy on the website began ordering through the marketplace, where Gramiyaa earned less on every sale. With the website offering limited growth and Amazon squeezing margins, quick commerce became the obvious next step.
The Commission Problem: Small Brands Pay More
For nearly a year the founders hesitated. Blinkit and Instamart charged commissions that were steep relative to the brand's 2-3% profit margin at the time. Yaseen's description of the gap is blunt: if a national cooking oil brand paid a commission of X, a premium oil from a national brand paid about 1.5X, and Gramiyaa, small and unproven, had to pay twice as much.
The advertising commitment made the decision harder. Brands entering quick commerce with three or four SKUs can be expected to spend Rs 5-10 lakh a month on advertising before they have established consistent demand. For a business running on thin margins, that is real capital committed against no assurance of sales. Gramiyaa listed on Blinkit in 2024 and the channel stayed loss-making for nearly six months. Yaseen's observation is that most brands doing reasonably well on quick commerce barely break even or lose money for six months to a year.
Yaseen also argues that quick commerce is not automatically more expensive than traditional distribution. On a Rs 400 product where the brand needs to retain Rs 300, the remaining Rs 100 covers platform margins and advertising. In general trade, a similar amount disappears into distributor margins, retailer commissions and the cost of a sales team. The real barrier for a small brand is not the rate card but the working capital needed to absorb losses until the channel generates volume.
For Gramiyaa the commissions came down once demand proved itself. When monthly sales on the platform moved from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10-15 lakh and repeat purchases showed customers would switch apps for the product, platforms began treating the brand closer to a national player. That took negotiation, and it took roughly five to six months of pushing back on pricing changes and penalties the brand could not control.
One City, One SKU: The Playbook That Worked
The biggest strategic shift was understanding that quick commerce does not work like Amazon. On a marketplace, a brand can ship from one warehouse anywhere in India and ranking depends on clicks and conversions, not on where the buyer lives. In quick commerce, what matters is how fast a product sells in a particular neighbourhood.
At the dark-store level, a slow-moving product may get just one unit of inventory. Once a customer buys it, the product can stay unavailable for 24-48 hours until replenishment. Unless it sells consistently in that locality, the platform has little reason to allocate more stock. That creates a loop small brands find hard to break: limited inventory causes stockouts, and without sales velocity, more inventory is hard to justify.
Yaseen's rule is to launch in one city where the brand has full confidence in the product, rather than spreading across four cities where it is only fairly sure. Within that city, the product has to sell quickly in at least half the dark stores before platforms begin stocking it more deeply.
Gramiyaa started tracking performance pin code by pin code, with an intern manually checking where products appeared in search results and whether they were in stock. The exercise showed two things: in some areas platforms were not stocking the brand at all, and in others demand was strong enough that products sold out fast. The brand used that data to push for more units where demand was proven. It now uses a third-party dashboard, Nitro Commerce, which Yaseen checks every morning.
The same discipline was applied to advertising. The team found it was sometimes paying to promote products already ranking well organically. By comparing organic and paid share of voice at the SKU and city level, it redirected budgets to products and locations where extra visibility could actually move sales.
Availability as the Real Marketing Metric
Gramiyaa now targets 90% on-shelf availability and typically hits 85-90%. Yaseen points out that even the category leader manages only 92-93% in its best month. That gap is the opening for a smaller brand: when a leading brand runs out of stock, shoppers look for alternatives, and a product that happens to be available at that moment can win a customer it would never have reached through discounts.
Assortment decisions follow the same logic. Gramiyaa's bestseller on quick commerce is one-litre groundnut oil. It once listed half-litre bottles as a cheaper trial pack, and the size initially accounted for 30% of groundnut oil sales. The share held rather than fading, and half-litre packs still account for about 15% of total volume, roughly 30% of customers. But stocking two sizes splits the limited inventory a dark store allocates to one brand, while a competitor selling only one-litre packs can stay available for longer. Yaseen chose to prioritise the larger pack and accept losing the shoppers who will not buy without a half-litre option.
Not every product decision worked. Of four oils introduced on quick commerce, one failed because it could not be priced competitively and did not suit the brand's core customers in southern India. The lesson was that a wider range does not automatically produce higher sales when shelf space in a dark store is finite and a weak SKU ties up resources that belong with bestsellers.
Pricing brought its own battles. Platforms changed selling prices to match rivals, and at times asked Gramiyaa to cover the difference. Yaseen describes getting caught between two giants fighting to acquire customers, and the price swings caused significant losses in the early months. The brand now sells one-litre packs in the Rs 350-750 range, with groundnut oil listed at Rs 490 MRP and Rs 428 on its own site, sunflower at Rs 590 MRP and Rs 428 on offer, and coconut oil at Rs 1,050 MRP and Rs 810. That ticket size matters: a single bottle is expensive enough to clear a platform's free-delivery threshold, so the brand does not depend on being added to a larger grocery basket. Customers reorder every 40-45 days and buy 1.3-1.4 products per order.
The Trade-Off Between Growth and Profit
Gramiyaa was profitable in FY25. It is not prioritising profit now, because it is spending on brand visibility and new channels. It recently raised Rs 21 crore as part of an ongoing Series A round led by Optiscape Network Holdings, with Homegrown Ventures, Campus Fund and others participating. The money is going into Tier II expansion, where Yaseen sees a different quick commerce proposition: in smaller cities the draw is not always ten-minute delivery but access to products that neighbourhood kirana stores do not stock. For a premium oil with limited offline distribution there, that is a genuine opening.
He is also relaxed about platforms pushing their own private labels, because Gramiyaa sells in a premium segment to customers who choose on quality rather than price. The harder question is how quickly platforms themselves penetrate smaller cities, since metro growth is moderating.
What Smaller Sellers Should Take Away
- Build the base first. Yaseen's advice to founders is to wait. Quick commerce should come after a brand has a core business on its own website or a marketplace, knows its hero products, has settled pricing, and has cash flow or funding from another channel.
- Start with one city and one SKU. Depth beats spread. Velocity in a cluster of dark stores earns deeper inventory allocation; a thin presence across many cities earns stockouts.
- Track availability, not just sales. Check where your product actually appears and stays in stock at pin-code level, then use that evidence to ask platforms for more units.
- Do not pay for visibility you already have. Compare organic and paid placement by product and city before spending on ads.
- Price for the basket you want. A ticket size above the free-delivery threshold lets a single unit stand on its own.
- Budget for six to twelve months of losses. Commission cuts follow proof of demand, not promises, and they are negotiated, not granted.
The wider signal for Indian D2C sellers is that quick commerce rewards operational discipline more than marketing spend. A brand that knows exactly which dark store ran out of which pack this morning has an advantage that a bigger advertising budget cannot buy.
