India’s quick-commerce platforms are actively hiring for a role that has taken on new urgency following recent regulatory enforcement: a quality checker. A Mint review revealed at least 94 open positions in Bengaluru across Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart, as regulators step up inspections of the dark stores behind rapid deliveries.
The regulatory crackdown has intensified of late. On 13 August, Maharashtra’s food and drug administration (FDA) inspected 86 facilities, including dark stores and food-storage units linked to the three companies. Lapses involving cockroaches, expired inventory, and cold rooms operating above mandated temperatures led the FDA to suspend 14 licenses, including five each associated with Blinkit and Zepto, and two with Instamart.
Just two days prior, Karnataka’s food safety department sealed a Zepto warehouse in Hoskote, near Bengaluru, citing hygiene and labeling violations. Zepto said after the sealing that it had “fully cooperated with the authorities during the inspection, taken note of the observations and suggestions shared, and was taking the necessary steps to address them”.
This is not the first time quick-commerce dark stores have faced food-safety action. In June 2025, Maharashtra’s FDA suspended Zepto’s Dharavi licence after finding fungal growth and expired stock, though the order was revoked two weeks later. The same month, the FDA shut a Blinkit dark store in Pune’s Balewadi over several lapses, including operating without a food licence, improper storage, dusty racks, and inadequate pest-control records.
Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto did not respond to Mint’s queries.
Scaling up, spreading thin
Dark stores have become larger as quick-commerce companies scale. Sameer Varma, executive director at ColdStar Logistics, said, “When we began working with quick-commerce platforms in 2020, most dark stores were between 1,000 and 1,200 sq ft. Today, excluding the larger mega stores, they average around 2,000 to 2,500 sq ft.” ColdStar now services about 7,000 dark stores, Varma added.
Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart had a combined 5,026 dark stores in May, up 48% from a year earlier, according to Equirus.
To break even, a typical dark store needs to process about 1,500 to 2,000 orders a day. Staffing varies with size and volume, usually ranging from 12 to 35 people, including store managers, shift supervisors, pickers, packers, loaders and unloaders. For busier locations like a high-volume Mumbai store, handling 3,000 to 4,000 daily orders requires an in-store workforce of 35 to 40 people, said Balasubramanian Anantha Narayanan, senior vice-president and business head at staffing firm TeamLease Services Ltd.
In the June quarter, Blinkit reported adjusted revenue of ₹15,664 crore and an adjusted Ebitda profit of ₹102 crore, its fifth straight quarter of improvement. Its net order value rose 86% year-on-year to ₹17,132 crore as its dark-store network expanded to 2,443. Instamart’s adjusted revenue rose 53% to ₹1,232 crore and its gross order value increased nearly 40% to ₹7,907 crore, though it recorded an adjusted Ebitda loss of ₹778 crore during the quarter. Zepto, meanwhile, doubled its FY26 operating revenue to ₹22,623 crore, but its net loss widened 26% to ₹5,905 crore.
Regulatory blind spots
Part of the compliance challenge stems from how quick-commerce hubs are defined under the law. “Indian food law does not presently recognise a ‘dark store’ as a separate statutory category,” said Dr Adv. Rishabh Gandhi, former judge and founder of Rishabh Gandhi and Advocates. Its classification instead depends on the activities conducted at the site, he noted. Under the Food Safety and Standards Act, operations involving storage, processing, packaging, transportation, distribution and sale can bring a facility under multiple food-business categories, with responsibility resting on the entity that controls those activities.
He added that FSSAI’s food safety compliance system framework generally requires each food-handling location to have its own licence or registration, although multiple kinds of business can be endorsed on the same premises-specific licence.
"Therefore, a platform's corporate-level or e-commerce licence does not ordinarily substitute for the licence or registration required for an individual food-handling dark store," Gandhi added.
Under the framework, a food-handling dark store must obtain an FSSAI registration if its annual turnover is up to ₹1.5 crore; an FSSAI state licence if turnover exceeds ₹1.5 crore but is no more than ₹50 crore; and an FSSAI central licence if turnover exceeds ₹50 crore. E-commerce food businesses require a central licence regardless of turnover.
“The existing framework is capable of regulating dark stores, but it was not originally designed around the economics and operating rhythm of 10-minute commerce,” Gandhi said.
Where the system breaks down
India already has food-safety rules for warehouses and food-storage facilities, but their enforcement and day-to-day implementation remain uneven, according to Varma and Narayanan. Dark stores that handle food must hold valid FSSAI licences or registrations and comply with norms on hygienic storage, temperature control, pest management, worker hygiene, stock rotation and traceability.
Gandhi pointed out that Schedule 4 of the Food Safety and Standards (Licensing and Registration of Food Businesses) Regulations, 2011 already makes sanitation, pest management, suitable storage, temperature control where required, supervision, documentation and recordkeeping integral parts of food-safety compliance.
"For a quick-commerce network operating hundreds of stores, however, paper compliance is unlikely to be enough. From a risk-management perspective, platforms will increasingly require store-level compliance ownership, central food-safety teams, automated cold-chain alerts, pest-control logs, expiry exception reports, supplier traceability, staff training, internal audits and rapid escalation mechanisms," Gandhi added.
Varma said while platforms have central quality-control and audit teams, along with third-party auditors, these systems can fail at the store level. “There is a whole engine in place. The fact is that the engine has broken in recent times,” he said.
The pressure is greatest when teams must receive stock, shelf inventory, pick orders, and maintain strict hygiene standards, all while racing against tight delivery deadlines. “There is a two-and-a-half-minute window to process the order. When you are trying to do this 2,000 times a day, that is where the madness begins,” Varma said.
Dedicated layer of scrutiny
Quick-commerce companies are responding by adding quality checkers at the store level. One Instamart quality-checker role in Bengaluru’s Ejipura offers ₹14,500 a month, along with an attendance bonus of up to ₹1,500, to inspect packed orders before a rider picks them up, check expiry dates, and maintain daily quality logs.
The new quality-checker roles could add a dedicated layer of scrutiny at the store level. “It is very unfair to expect a loader to take responsibility for quality control,” Narayanan said. “That’s exactly why you have these supervisors and store managers, who govern this whole process.”
Narayanan said platforms are still deciding whether to appoint a checker at each dark store, rely on centralised audit teams, retrain existing workers, or use a hybrid model involving third-party staff. “It could be as simple as putting one guy per dark store, or it could be a central framework with ongoing training programmes,” he said.
The additional payroll may not result in a separate food-safety charge, but could reduce the deep discounts platforms offer customers, Narayanan said. Varma added that costs go beyond salaries because pickers, packers, managers and quality checkers are difficult to retain. Platforms must also factor in incentives, allowances, statutory benefits, and high attrition, he added.
Traditional trade fights back
Meanwhile, traditional retailers are calling for broader structural reforms. In a letter sent on Tuesday to Union health minister J.P. Nadda, the All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation called for surprise inspections, a standardized food-safety operating procedure, and a nationally mandated, scientifically validated SKU-to-space ratio.
To prevent overcrowding, the group proposed allocating 0.35 to 0.40 sq ft. per SKU, meaning a facility with 65,000 SKUs would require a floor area of 23,000-26,000 sq ft, subject to adjustments for product mix, refrigeration needs, and movement space.
Dhairyashil Patil, national president of the federation, noted that quick commerce has captured 10-15% of distributors' volumes across the more than 200 cities where it operates, urging authorities to implement stricter regulations for dark stores.