Amazon Fresh expands services to four more cities

Ecommerce giant Amazon on Thursday said it has expanded its grocery delivery service Amazon Fresh to Kolkata, Pune, Chennai and Ahmedabad.

The service enables quick deliveries of groceries and other daily essentials at pre-selected four-hour time slots from 6 am to midnight.

Amazon Fresh, accessible through the etailers’s mobile and web marketplace, is only available at select pin codes of the newly-added cities, Siddharth Nambiar, director of category management at Amazon India, said in a statement. The service will soon be expanded to cover all city pin codes, he said.

The total number of Amazon Fresh centres across the country has risen to 25, including the new ones opened to ramp up operations in the cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR, where the service is already active.

All these centres have been equipped with dedicated freezer and refrigeration zones and special packaging systems to ensure safe storage and delivery of frozen foods and other products, the company said.

“The investment in these specialised centres is in line with our long-term commitment to invest in India and create hundreds of job opportunities,” Prakash Kumar Dutta, Amazon India’s vice president of fulfilment operations and supply chain, said.  

Read: Targeting high-frequency grocery segment, Amazon launches Fresh service in India

The push for Amazon Fresh comes as the e-grocery segment continues to witness a surge in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has spurred a digital shift, prompting people to shop and pay online and take doorstep deliveries, even for essentials.

Currently, the company said that Fresh offers more than 5,000 products across categories such as fruits and vegetables, dairy, staples, packaged food, personal care and home care. Orders above Rs 600 are delivered for free, while the rest have a delivery fee of Rs 29.