The ubiquitous kirana or corner stores are an indispensable part of the FMCG eco system in India and major brands vie for their loyalty and customers. According to a report, there are 12 million kirana stores today in India with a retail market size of $ 700 billion. But for kirana stores to accelerate their growth and in turn drive growth for FMCG brands would mean using technology to offer better services to their customers.

Enabling these kirana stores do exactly that with the right tech support are companies like Peel-Works. Retail4Growth chats up with Prakash Bharwani, Chief Operating Officer, Peel-Works, to understand their solutions and how they are using data to help both kirana stores and FMCG brands meet customer demands.

Tell us about the origins of Peel-Works. What kind of tech solutions do you provide in the FMCG space and to kirana stores?

Peel-works is a completely corner store processed company. There are 12-14 million corner stores in India, but we have only focused on the million odd stores that are present in the large to medium cities, who have most of the purchasing power and are also more organised.

Peel-works started about 10 years ago when we tried to figure out a solution to address the needs of the corner stores to fill in their out of stock inventories. So the solution that we provide is focused on out of stock inventories, whether it is our sales force productivity tool or it is the point of sale solution.

The POS system fits in all of the corner stores and captures the sales data of the product and passes them on to FMCG companies. The data helps the FMCG companies in two ways – first it helps the companies understand which categories of theirs are sold more and which products of their competitors are sold more. Secondly, the data helps the companies run more promotions to drive more sales in the corner stores. Our solutions help the corner stores to buy more efficiently and also make more money in the process.

The current buying process for the store is very inefficient. When a shopkeeper places an order of out of stock inventories form the distributors, they are not assured that it will get delivered on time. And a lot of time the distributor loads the shopkeeper with unnecessary product and forces them to buy. These are some of the challenges that the corner store faces currently. To address this problem, we have launched a solution 16 months ago called ‘Taikee’ to help the corner stores in their buying process.

What is peel-works’ USP?

I think there are many. Peel-works is entirely grocery corner store focused. We are a technology driven company that helps to resolve the critical problem that stores are facing– like out of stock inventories, working capital blockage, over ordering etc. We are completely B2B driven.

Read the full interview in Point-of-Purchase July Edition.