Chaldal, the leader in online grocery in Dhaka, announced that it has expanded coverage to Narayanganj. The new operation will cover the entire Narayanganj town and parts of Munshiganj. The company has set up warehouses in Narayanganj, similar to how it manages its operation in Dhaka and will follow a similar model in terms of logistics and operation. The company says the operation will rely on Dhaka supply chains for fulfillment.
Chaldal has historically been cautious about expansion. While other on-demand deliveries and ecommerce companies target regional cities such as Sylhet and Chittagong for expansion, Narayanganj could be called the first outside Dhaka expansion of Chaldal. The grocery supply chain is complex and expensive. It appears Chaldal is mindful of this challenge when it comes to expansion. To that end, Narayanganj makes sense since it can rely on Dhaka's supply chain for managing the operation. In fact, the company is exactly doing that. Narayanganj is one of the densely populated cities with over 2 million population (2011 census).
In July 2019, Chaldal completed its coverage of the entire Dhaka city with expansion to Jatrabari and adjacent areas, which helped the company to improve its overall numbers. Chaldal has experienced excellent growth amid the coronavirus pandemic throughout 2020. With the new expansion to Narayanganj, it appears the company aims to push that growth to a new level and cement its lead in the market.
Chaldal was founded in 2013 by Waseem Alim, Zia Ashraf, and Tejas Viswanath with an ambition to gain share in online grocery shopping, a then-nascent market with seemingly boundless growth opportunities. As we wrote in How Chaldal Works: “the Chaldal founders aimed to make grocery shopping seamless. The company has since evolved. Today, it has not only built a successful online grocery business, but it has also built an end-to-end grocery supply chain creating a direct backward linkage with farmers as well as a forward linkage with smallholder retailers allowing it greater leverage in the grocery supply chain. Chaldal is building a suite of businesses that allows customers to avail groceries at a better price and improve the overall grocery supply chain in Bangladesh. These businesses handle everything from working directly with farmers to working with smallholder retailers to micro-warehousing and logistics.
Chaldal is also pursuing some more unexpected areas, including working in the Rohingya refugee camp with WFP, making a strategic investment into home food delivery startup Cookups, and turning its marketplace tech into Chaldal Systems.
Over the last decade, Chaldal has expanded its platform beyond the marketplace and micro-warehouse model and embedded itself firmly into the grocery supply chain with initiatives like Chaldal Vegetable Network and logistics operations Go Go Bangla.
As a result of its product innovation efforts, Chaldal has seen excellent growth in product adoption and business and has broadened its product offerings across the entire grocery shopping stack.
In 2020, the company closed its Series B funding round and amid the current coronavirus pandemic, Chaldal has been experiencing excellent growth.”
