Country Delight Provides Uninterrupted Delivery of Daily Essentials During Pandemic

In midst of frozen supply chain infrastructure during the national lockdown, Country Delight, a leading door-step milk delivery platform has successfully been able to keep up its deliveries even as each day brings up new challenges. The company is successfully delivering Milk and other dairy essentials everyday to the households without a single-day miss. As people avoid public places with the fear of community transmission and opting for online channels, regular users of the application jumped over 75% since last month.

The company planned ahead of time for a lockdown scenario, which enabled its services to continue without a single day of disruption. Country Delight focused on three fundamental aspects during this period - regular communication with relevant policy stakeholders, ensuring health and safety of delivery partners and customers, and issuing constant updates to customers about deliveries.

The initial days were most challenging to manage on-ground timely deliveries for Country Delight as the government policies were evolving constantly. However, communicating properly with the relevant stakeholders in order to get the necessary permissions in time made daily early morning deliveries possible. ID cards, curfew passes, and other necessary documents were arranged and issued to all delivery partners, transport vehicles and suppliers to ensure timely movement of goods. To make the process smoother, delivery timings were altered to comply with government mandates on traffic movement.

Country Delight initiated contactless delivery to safeguard its delivery partners as well as customers. “Safety and security of our Country Delight family members is the most important priority for us right now, especially our delivery boys”, said co-founder Mr. Chakradhar Gade. On the same lines, the Company has also introduced COVID-19 medical insurance for their entire workforce, including the ones involved in manufacturing and delivery operations. Moreover, paid leaves are being offered for employees who are not keeping well and policies are in place for maintaining social distancing at work-place as much as possible.

In the midst of all the confusion, it becomes vitally important to update the customer about timely deliveries, especially, when we talk about maintaining the supply of daily essential goods. Towards this undertaking, the team was constantly in touch with its customers, giving them IVR recorded delivery updates and assuring them seamless delivery on the next day.

On Country Delight providing a seamless experience, Mr. Gade said, “We started planning for the curfew and eventual lockdown from 14th March, one week before the junta curfew was imposed. This allowed us to manage our operations effectively. We are perhaps the only online delivery business that has provided uninterrupted delivery of essential services to our consumers every day, without fail. There is heavy responsibility taken by people working on the ground, delivery partners, hence, their safety and morale is paramount to us.”

The company confirmed that this period of isolation and uncertainty has resulted in huge overnight changes to the average consumer’s shopping behavior, from a shift towards online ordering from retail to using digital payment options to bulk-purchasing of essentials. Apart from milk, the consumers are ordering an array of products from the portfolio of Country Delight as the average order size has gone up. This can be due to two reasons - the entire family is staying at home resulting in increased consumption of edibles in-house, and that people spurred by uncertainty are stocking essentials.

Country Delight provides fresh and unadulterated milk, dairy products and other essentials, using a sourcing model that ensures quality and eliminates middlemen. Currently it runs operations in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai-Pune and Bengaluru-Chennai belts.