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Runaway growth: Instamart now revisits dark-store bet
Mint Mumbai
|August 07, 2025
It paused expansion efforts to improve utilisation, possibly allowing Blinkit to widen its lead
After a year of steroid-fuelled dark-store expansion to outpace rivals, Instamart is staring at leaner carts. Its orders per dark store per day have fallen 22% over the past nine months, from a peak of 1,260 recorded during the second quarter of 2024-25 to 985 by the first quarter of 2025-26.
Part of the dip could be the ramp-up lag—new stores take months to optimize inventory, layout and demand. However, the quick-commerce player's recent averages falling short suggest deeper structural overcapacity, not just early-stage teething troubles, because mature dark stores in similar models tend to stabilize at higher order volume, warned Nilaya Varma, co-founder of management consulting firm Primus Partners.
This story is from the August 07, 2025 edition of Mint Mumbai.
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