ET was unable to independently confirm the number of redundancies, but news reports from Entrackr indicated that about a quarter of Milkbasket’s headcount of over 600 employees would be impacted. The redundancies will be across sales, delivery operations, marketing and other verticals, a person aware of the matter told ET.
Reliance is also contemplating changes in Milkbasket’s branding and is considering having a single brand identity for its overall grocery service. However, a final decision is yet to be taken, and the Milkbasket brand will likely continue to exist in the near term, the person added.
Requests for a comment from Reliance did not elicit any response until publishing time.
The changes at Milkbasket come after the recent departure of chief executive Yatish Talvadia, chief operating officer Abhinav Imandi and chief financial officer Gaurav Srivastava from the company. Talvadia was the last remaining co-founder at the firm, as per recent reports, after other co-founders like Ashish Goel, Anurag Jain and Anant Goel left in 2021.
The integration has been in the works for some time, and a few Jiomart executives have joined the business too, another person in the know said. The firm now operates in over 20 cities, following a post-acquisition scale-up. Reliance disclosed the acquisition of a 96.49% stake in Milkbasket under its second quarter results of FY22.
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The deal had been preceded by issues in the startup’s cap table, with investor Kalaari Capital’s sale of its entire stake in the firm to Mahendra Nahata-led MN Televentures being hotly contested by Milkbasket. Milkbasket competes directly with the likes of Tata-backed BigBasket’s BB Daily in the subscription-based delivery market. BB Daily is a part of BigBasket’s B2C arm, which reported an 89% increase in its net loss for the year ended March 2023.