Amid the buzz around 10-minute grocery delivery, Tata-owned egrocer BigBasket is set to unveil its one-hour delivery service, BB Express, with 7,500-8,000 products on offer.

Typically, 10- to 20-minute delivery services can offer half of that number of products as they prioritize speed over wider selection of products.

Hari Menon, cofounder and chief executive says, “the service will be launched next month and will be powered through the company’s 62 large-scale dark stores. Delivery from these warehouses will be mostly through bikes.”

“We have over 62 large dark stores spread across around 30,000 sq ft that are used for four- to five-hour delivery of core BigBasket business. These will power the BB Service with an SKU (stock-keeping unit, or product) range of close to 8,000,” Menon adds.

Once launched, this will mark the multi-model approach of BigBasket trying to service various consumer needs. Menon also feels a wider selection to deliver in an hour is a sustainable service.

BigBasket has also launched a 20-minutes delivery service, BB Now, with around 3,000 SKUs available, as the race for ultra-fast grocery delivery heats up among players like Zepto, Zomato-backed Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart and Reliance-backed Dunzo.

Menon says while he was bullish on one-hour delivery, and his 20-minute delivery service was expanding, 80 percent of the company’s gross sales would still come from planned grocery purchases through its core model, where it was mostly able to deliver products on the same day.

“You would see with a higher frequency of purchases; the average order value goes down. For us, 80-85 percent of gross sales will come from planned purchases. We are using existing infrastructure built over the years for BB Express without the need to make new investments for it,” Menon adds.