Ten minutes to your door, no minutes to clean

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:01)
Over the last few days, food safety inspectors in Hyderabad have been walking into dark stores, the small warehouses that quick commerce apps deliver your groceries from.
Across two drives, they checked dozens of them, run by Zepto, Blinkit and Big Basket, and reported expired stock on the shelves, pest and rodent infections, and vegetables going to fungus.
Four stores were ordered shut on the spot. Now, the same thing has been happening in Maharashtra this month, where the raids have actually got a face. Tukaram Munde, the state's food safety chief, has spent the summer shutting down famous restaurants and sending even a notice to Shah Rukh Khan over a paan masala ad. Enough to make him a minor celebrity. Clips of his inspections are online everywhere. When his inspectors turned to quick commerce, they checked 86 dark stores and suspended the licenses of around a dozen out of them.
They found cockroaches, rotting vegetables, and at one Zepto site, a packet of chicken four days past its expiry date, sitting in a chiller that was running warmer than the law allows.
So here we have two state regulators acting on their own, walking into the same problem within the same few weeks. When these dark store photos got out, the people who order on these apps every day said what you would expect, about time. But here is the thing that the cheering skips over. Everything found is the predictable result of the most important features that these apps sell to us. To get that packet of chicken to you in 10 minutes, it has to be stored close by, in your neighborhood, and not in some warehouse at the edge of the town. And space in a residential area is limited, and it is expensive. So these stores cannot get very big. But here is the real pressure that they're under. These apps compete with each other on selection. Whoever can offer the most variety of products in 10 minutes is the winner. So each store is pushed to carry more and more. A full supermarket's worth of range, crammed into a space that cannot grow too much. So what ultimately ends up happening in this room that is built to move fast, the work that keeps the food safe which is checking dates, controlling the temperature, cleaning the racks, it gets skipped. So what Munday found is exactly what this quick delivery design produces when it runs as intended. He can go on and shut every dark store in the state and still not be able to fix this.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 25th of August.
Every dark store is caught in a contradiction, and that contradiction is actually where your food goes bad. To deliver to you in 10 minutes, it has to sit in your neighborhood, which means it cannot be big. And to win your order, it has to carry more than the app next door, which means it has to hold a lot. Small footprint, huge inventory, something has to give, and it's not the inventory. So whether it is 2,000 square feet or 8,000 square feet, a dark store carries the assortment of a full supermarket in a commercial space that is wedged into a residential area. And the newer, larger stores are getting bigger to stock more, not to give what is already there more space. An average dark store handles more than 1200 orders a day and is run by a team of 8-15 people. Every second in that room is spoken for. An order lands, a picker races to the racks, packer seals it, a rider grabs it, under 3 minutes, start to finish. Now, here is my argument about this entire model. The work that keeps the food safe earns nothing against that clock. Whether it is rotating stock so that the older products ship first, or it is checking the chillers and if they are at the correct temperature, and pulling expired items, cleaning racks, keeping raw apart from packaged products.
In a room this packed, moving this fast with this few people, this type of safety work is going to be the first slip. In fact, the people who manufacture a lot of these food products have been pointing to this for over a year now.
Close to a dozen packaged food companies or FMCG companies, like Britannia, KRBL and Heritage among them, complained to the platforms about storage and handling. The maker of Cornitos actually put it quite bluntly, franchise dark stores are the weakest link, and the platforms need to step up audits. Now, to be fair, most stores passed the inspection in Maharashtra. Of the 86 that were checked, around 14 were suspended. So the companies could argue that the failures are the exceptions. Agreed. But the same type of violations are the ones that are keeping on turning up. Yesterday, it was Hyderabad, then the ones in Dharavi, Pune, Mumbai. The type of the failure is the same, which means that it is coming from something that the stores share. And what they share is the model. Your order today is probably fine. Most stores do pass the inspection. But across thousands of them around the country running this fast, probably fine is not what food safety is supposed to mean.