You can now get unique Indian groceries delivered to your door.

Image Credit: ABODE STOCK

Calling Kamloops Indian food lovers — you can now get authentic ghee, spices, snacks, frozen foods, drinks, pickles and personal care items delivered right to your door.

Express Cart just launched in Kamloops and has plans to move to the Okanagan. It has been serving people in Metro Vancouver for more than a month and offers a same-day delivery grocery service specifically catering to the Indian food market.

With time, cofounders Mandy Singh and Karanbir Singh hope to expand to serve all of B.C. with a wide variety of ethnic foods.

“The variety in the stores is not that much, and we are limited to the options. With a lot of international students coming to the town, I felt like this was a good opportunity to serve that community. We can provide a wide variety of products. If it goes well, it could actually be a full-fledged grocery store instead of just delivering a specific bag of groceries,” Mandy says.

Mandy moved to Kamloops 11 years ago as an international student and missed many of his familiar favourite foods from India. He finds it surprising there is no Indian grocery store here and said that the international aisles of major grocery stores carry only a small fraction of the foods he was searching for.

“I was in that situation where I wanted all these food and grocery items but I couldn’t get them. Also, as a student myself I had to travel to the grocery store and pick up groceries and come back walking in the snow, so that was the other reason we wanted to do free delivery as well, so students get those benefits.”

Mandy says this service differs from other existing delivery services as it caters especially to Indian foods, which heh has shipped in from suppliers. The drivers are responsible for ordering, stocking, and delivering the items, which he says cuts down significantly on the cost to the customer.

“Our products...because we are getting directly from suppliers, we can get good pricing on the products,” Mandy says. “We make money on the product so we don’t have to worry about the delivery fees, so we’re offering free delivery over $50.”

If it is an order under $50, you can get your groceries delivered for a flat $5 fee, regardless of where in the city you are.

Mandy says that the beginning of the business will help the team to better understand the needs and wants of the community. He says they plan to expand to include other hard-to-find ethnic foods as well, and they will run a survey to determine what other ethnic foods they should include.

“We are focusing on the Indian market right now but our plans in the future are to expand into a full-fledged grocery service, not just for one market,” Mandy says. "Our next option would be Kelowna, and also we are thinking of doing this all over B.C."

Express Cart has a team of four drivers and one person behind the scenes in charge of marketing and social media. Mandy hopes to expand the service throughout the province and offer many more jobs.

To check out Express Cart and get some Indian foods right to your home, click here.

— This story was updated at 11:07 a.m. on November 18, 2019, to include Karanbir Singh as a co-founder of Express Cart.

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News from © iNFOnews, 2019