Vipul Mittal returns to bigbasket as chief agri business officer

BENGALURU: Full circle. That is the only way to describe Vipul Mittal’s return to bigbasket, the Bengaluru-based online grocer, as chief agri business officer. Nine years after he first walked out of the company having built its fruit and vegetable business more or less from scratch, he walks back in to run the whole agri and fresh produce portfolio. Companies rarely get do-overs this clean. Bigbasket clearly reckons it has found one.

The résumé does the talking. Thirty-five years in food and FMCG retail, more than eighteen of them spent wrestling with India’s chaotic, middleman-heavy agriculture and fresh produce trade, is not a common combination. Mittal cut his teeth at GCMMF, the cooperative behind Amul, where he spent 15 years and rose to zonal head for north india. It was there, in 2003, that he ran the launch of Amul milk in Delhi, a campaign that eventually dethroned the once-dominant Mother Dairy brand in its own backyard. That is the sort of market-share upset consultants write case studies about.

From cooperatives he moved to the harder, messier end of the business: fresh produce. General manager for horticulture at Mother Dairy, then head of produce at Bharti Walmart, where he built supply chains for fruit and vegetables across the country with full profit-and-loss responsibility. Then came bigbasket the first time round, nearly a decade of scaling the F&V category into a serious business, followed by a stint as managing director of National Cooperative Organics Limited, a government-backed push to organise India’s organic farming sector.

Why does this matter. Fresh produce remains the section quick-commerce and e-grocery firms find hardest to crack. Margins are thin, wastage is brutal, and sourcing directly from farmers while keeping shelves stocked and prices sane is a logistical headache that has broken lesser operators. Bigbasket is not simply rehiring an old hand for sentimental reasons. It is betting that someone who has already solved this puzzle once for the company, and who has since picked up fresh experience in cooperative and organic farming structures, can do it again at a time when rivals are throwing serious money at the category. Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart have all been racing to deepen their fresh and grocery play, and dark-store economics only work if wastage and sourcing costs are kept on a tight leash.

Mittal himself called the move a full-circle moment, saying he wants to focus on customers, farmers, partners and people as bigbasket sharpens its presence across the agri value chain. Bigbasket, for its part, is signalling that its next phase of growth in fresh produce will lean heavily on institutional memory rather than a fresh face learning the ropes from scratch. Given how badly Indian e-grocery has been burnt by fresh produce before, that looks like a sensible bet.