What is a dark store?

Updated October 2026

• 8,241dark stores across six apps in India

How a dark store works, step by step

Inside, a dark store looks like a supermarket, with racks, fridges and freezers. The steps follow a January 2025 account of one Blinkit store in Ranchi. Other apps work in much the same way.

1. You place the order. The app checks which store covers your address and has the items in stock. The order appears on a handheld device at that store and an operator accepts it.
2. A picker collects the items. The device shows a photo of each product and a location code for its shelf. The picker scans each barcode; the item drops off the list and the next one appears.
3. The order is packed and handed over. Picking to handover took about two minutes.
4. A waiting rider delivers it. Riders wait at the store, so no time is lost finding one. That store served a delivery radius of 2.5 to 3 km.
5. The shelves are refilled. A larger warehouse, called a mother hub (about 7 km away in Ranchi), restocked the store every morning, with extra top-ups later in the day when needed.

Where dark stores came from

Dark stores began in British online grocery. In 2009 Tesco opened stores in Croydon and Aylesford that served only online orders. Until then, its online orders had been picked from the shelves of its supermarkets. The format spread across Europe, and in 2020 Whole Foods opened its first online-only store in Brooklyn.

Those early stores fed scheduled van deliveries. India’s version is much smaller and closer to homes, built for orders that arrive in minutes, with riders on two-wheelers instead of vans.

What does a dark store stock?

A typical quick-commerce range grew from about 6,000 products (SKUs) in 2023 to over 20,000 in 2024. Blinkit now sets its range by city. It stocks close to 80,000 SKUs in Delhi-NCR, about 50,000 in the next seven cities and about 20,000 elsewhere (July 2026). So the same app shows fewer products in a smaller city.

Most of the space goes to groceries, fruit and vegetables, dairy, frozen food, snacks and household and personal-care items. Many stores now also carry phones, gadgets and small appliances. Some Zepto stores have a Zepto Cafe counter that makes coffee and snacks. Prescription medicines are sold only where a licensed pharmacy is attached.

How big is a dark store?

• Older stores were mostly 2,000–3,000 sq ft. Newer ones are above 5,000 sq ft.
• Instamart had 4.92 million sq ft across 1,171 stores on 30 June 2026, or about 4,200 sq ft each on average. It had 1,240 stores by 30 September 2026.
• Blinkit’s form for landlords asks for at least 2,000 sq ft of carpet area, a 9 ft ceiling and parking for 40 bikes.

How many orders a dark store handles a day

In January–March 2026 an average store handled an estimated 2,140 orders a day for Zepto, 1,425 for Blinkit and 1,093 for Instamart. A smaller-city store does fewer. The Ranchi store did 500–700 deliveries on a normal day in January 2025, and more than 1,000 on festival days.

Who works in a dark store

• Pickers and packers collect, check and bag orders. Blinkit advertises a “₹25,000 salary” for these dark store jobs, on 9-hour warehouse shifts.
• Inventory staff receive stock from the mother hub, put it on shelves and remove expired items.
• A store manager runs shifts, stock and hygiene, and deals with inspectors.
• Riders are delivery partners and are not on the store’s staff. The busy Ranchi store had about 60 waiting.

No app shares how many people work in a typical store.

Who runs dark stores and how much one costs to set up

The apps choose locations and run the technology, but some stores are run with partners. Blinkit has official pages and an app, Blinkit Partners, for store partners. Amazon Now uses some partner More stores as dark stores, and JioMart delivers from Reliance Stores.

Setting up one Blinkit store, including its share of warehousing, cost about ₹2.5 crore in July 2026, up from Blinkit’s earlier figure of about ₹1 crore. Industry estimates put a 2,500–3,000 sq ft store at ₹1.4–1.6 crore and a 5,000 sq ft store at about ₹2.4–2.5 crore. Blinkit also raised its expected sales per store from about ₹7 lakh to ₹11 lakh a day.

Why dark stores sit in basements and residential lanes

Delivery in minutes works only if the store is close to the homes it serves, and ground-floor space on main roads is costly. So stores often take basements, old showrooms and halls in side streets near housing. Neighbours of these dark stores in residential areas then deal with rider crowds, night-time unloading and noise. In a purely residential zone, a store with no walk-in customers is usually treated as a godown, which zoning rules do not allow.

Licences a dark store needs

A dark store is a food business, so it needs an FSSAI licence for its premises, along with GST, Shops and Establishments registration, a municipal trade licence and, in most buildings, a fire NOC. Stores that sell medicines also need a drug licence and a pharmacist. Food-safety officers inspect dark stores like any other food shop and can suspend a store’s licence.

Dark store vs kirana vs supermarket

The formats most often confused with a dark store are the micro-fulfilment centre and the warehouse, and dark store vs warehouse sets the three apart.