For years, Jahangir Alam had little reason to visit the grocery shops around his home in Agargaon, Dhaka. He had become accustomed to ordering from Chaldal, paying for the convenience of doorstep delivery rather than spending time navigating the local bazaar.
Then Chaldal stopped delivering to his area.
“I became heavily reliant on Chaldal and then suddenly they won’t deliver in my area,” Alam said.
His response was straightforward. He searched for another online option and found Pandamart, Foodpanda’s quick-commerce grocery service.
“I then switched to Pandamart and wondered if Chaldal was all gone.”
Alam is far from alone. Interviews with Chaldal customers across several parts of Dhaka point to a similar pattern: a service that once helped establish online grocery shopping as a habit among urban consumers has become unavailable in some areas.
Some former customers have migrated to Pandamart. Others are ordering online from supermarket chains such as Shwapno and Meena Bazar.
For Chaldal, the retreat marks a sharp turn. Once one of Bangladesh’s most prominent start-ups and a pioneer in persuading middle-class households to buy groceries online, the company is now struggling with a liquidity squeeze that has spilled into its operations.
What began as a financing problem is increasingly visible to customers — and competitors are moving into the space it is leaving behind.
The warning signs became difficult to ignore in March, when hundreds of Chaldal employees at its Jashore operation protested over unpaid salaries. Workers said three to four months of wages were outstanding. By then, the company had reduced its workforce from about 3,300 to 2,200 over the previous year.
Chaldal itself acknowledged the severity of its financial difficulties.
In a letter to state-run Startup Bangladesh, reported by The Business Standard newspaper, the company described itself as facing an “acute short-term liquidity crisis”. Delayed funding inflows had coincided with mounting payroll, vendor and operating expenses.
Chaldal sought 40 crore taka in emergency or bridge financing even as it continued to generate roughly 40 crore taka in monthly sales, according to the report.
After the Jashore protest, Chaldal chief operating officer Mahbub MM Muntasin said temporary salary delays had resulted from “funding and operational challenges” and that pending salaries were being processed, according to a written statement reported by online news portal Jago News24.
Daily Waadaa could not independently verify the statement.
Employees painted a more severe picture.
In a Facebook group for Chaldal riders, worker Siraj Kabir alleged that employees were owed several months of salaries as well as an Eid-ul-Fitr bonus.
“I could not buy medicine for my sick mother because you did not pay our salaries,” Kabir wrote.
Former employee Khadeja Khatun told The Daily Star newspaper that she had gone without her salary for four months before resigning after repeated requests for payment went unresolved.
Chaldal has maintained that it is suffering from a funding squeeze rather than facing the end of the business.
In a March interview with The Business Standard newspaper, founder and chief executive Waseem Alim said the company was engaged in several funding discussions that had slowed around the election period but had since accelerated. He expected the salary-payment problems to be resolved soon.
But the difficulties have persisted beyond the initial protests. Employees have continued to air grievances on social media, alleging salary arrears and financial hardship.
More damagingly for the business, the disruption has reached customers.
Where Chaldal has withdrawn or suspended deliveries, consumers who had already been persuaded to abandon some of their traditional grocery-shopping habits have not necessarily returned to the neighbourhood shop. Many are simply looking for another digital provider.
That raises a bigger question about Chaldal: how a company that has raised more than 300 crore taka from investors found itself without sufficient liquidity to keep its operations running normally.
Part of the answer may lie in the economics of the business itself.
Fahim Mashroor, co-founder and chief executive of Bdjobs.com, argues that Bangladesh is an unusually difficult market in which to build a large online grocery operation.
Its cities are already densely served by physical grocery shops. Consumers rarely have to travel far to buy daily necessities, reducing one of the principal advantages that e-commerce enjoys in markets where physical retail is less accessible.
“Online retailing is, of course, very difficult and challenging in a country like ours,” Mashroor told Waadaa.
The potential online market also remains relatively narrow. Although Dhaka has almost two crore residents, Mashroor estimates that perhaps no more than 10 lakh people currently shop online. For much of the population, nearby physical stores remain the easier option.
Chaldal’s business model adds another complication.
Unlike a marketplace such as Daraz, which connects buyers and sellers without necessarily owning the merchandise, Chaldal operates an inventory-based model. It must buy and hold products before selling them, tying up cash in stock.
“Daraz is a marketplace. A marketplace doesn't have to store the products itself. But Chaldal is inventory-based. It has to source the grocery products first and then sell them to customers. That requires a lot of working capital,” Mashroor said.
Syed Almas Kabir, former president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, points to a second structural problem: e-commerce businesses typically require long periods to generate adequate returns while spending heavily to acquire customers.
“E-commerce is virtual. You don't have a brick-and-mortar store. So you have to spend a lot on marketing and advertising. The marketing budget has to be huge,” Kabir told Waadaa.
Grocery makes that equation tougher because margins are thin.
“You have e-commerce, where you already need a large marketing budget, and then you have grocery, where the margins are very low,” he said.
Companies are therefore forced to balance the cost of marketing, delivery and warehousing against the limited margin available on everyday products.
“I think Chaldal is facing exactly this challenge — how to manage the money. Although it has received a lot of investment, it also has to spend a lot,” Kabir said.
His assessment is that businesses built on this model need two things that become particularly difficult to secure during a funding crunch: patience and deep pockets.
Chaldal’s financial difficulties have not reduced Bangladeshis’ need for groceries. Nor have they necessarily reversed the online-shopping habits the company spent years helping to create.
That is becoming an opportunity for competitors.
Foodpanda said orders for daily essentials through Pandamart have risen about 60 per cent year on year. The service now operates 16 cloud stores across Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet, Khulna and Rajshahi, each carrying more than 9,000 stock-keeping units.
The more significant shift, according to the company, is in how customers use the service.
“We are seeing strong growth in both new customer adoption and repeat orders as urban households shift from emergency single-item buys to regular, weekly grocery shopping,” Foodpanda said in response to questions for this article.
That change brings Pandamart closer to the territory Chaldal traditionally occupied, even if their underlying business models remain different.
Pandamart is built around quick commerce: smaller fulfilment centres positioned close to consumers and designed to deliver goods rapidly. Chaldal operates more like an online supermarket, with an inventory-based grocery model geared towards larger planned purchases.
Kabir cautions against treating the two as identical businesses.
“Pandamart is a quick-delivery service — quick commerce,” he said. “If you need something immediately, it will bring it to you within 15 minutes. That’s why Pandamart generally has higher prices. You pay a premium for the convenience.”
Chaldal, he said, competes more directly with supermarket groups such as Shwapno and Agora.
For consumers, however, those distinctions can matter less than whether an order arrives.
Jahangir had already been persuaded that buying groceries online was easier than visiting a shop. When Chaldal stopped delivering to his neighbourhood, he did not need to be persuaded to adopt e-commerce again. He merely needed another company to fulfill the order.
That is the competitive opening Chaldal’s difficulties have created.
Foodpanda says its grocery operation has evolved from digitising neighbourhood mudi dokans and supermarket chains including Shwapno, Agora and Unimart to developing its own network of Pandamart cloud stores. It is now focusing on expanding selection and availability while encouraging customers to make grocery purchases more regularly.
The risk for Chaldal is therefore not simply that its financial problems force it to shrink. It is that customers acquired at considerable expense over many years form new habits with competitors while Chaldal tries to repair its balance sheet and operations.
There are signs the company may yet regain its footing.
A source close to Chaldal told Waadaa that the company was close to securing fresh funding that could allow it to restore operations to normal levels. Chaldal did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment.
Fresh capital could ease the immediate pressure on salaries, suppliers and operations. But the competitive landscape may already be changing.
Chaldal helped demonstrate that Bangladeshis could be persuaded to buy groceries online despite the ubiquity of neighbourhood shops. Its current predicament is now testing another proposition: whether the customers it brought online will remain loyal when the deliveries stop.
For Jahangir, the answer has already arrived.
He still wants his groceries delivered. It no longer matters whether Chaldal is the company bringing them.
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