Meesho sacks 150 full-time employees

Meesho has fired 150 full-time employees from its grocery arm, days after the social commerce startup integrated its grocery business within the core app.

"About 150 full time employees will be impacted by the restructuring of Meesho Superstore which is aimed at bringing in efficiencies," the e-commerce firm said in a statement to Fortune India.

The SoftBank-backed unicorn has also sacked some contractual workers who were on third-party payrolls. "A small number of full-time roles and certain third-party positions on six-month contracts at Meesho Superstore were reassessed to remove redundancies with the core business," the company said in a blog post.

Meesho said it is offering severance packages and outplacement assistance to help those impacted secure new opportunities outside the company.

"The redundancies do not impact any positions at the core Meesho marketplace business, where we continue to hire and grow talent," the startup said.

The company had last week announced that it was integrating the grocery business within the core app to provide Meesho users a unified shopping experience, while driving stronger synergies across areas like customer acquisition, technology, product and talent.

Meesho Superstore currently provides 500 products across categories like fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, groceries, home care and packaged food, among others.

The startup launched online grocery services, Meesho Superstore, as a pilot in Karnataka less than nine months ago. With this foray, the idea was to meet consumer demand for affordable daily essentials in Tier 2+ markets as it aspires to become the single shopping destination for the next billion Indians.

In a short span of time, the company has scaled the offering to six states – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh – and plans to make it available in 12 states by the end of 2022.

"As we continue to scale our efforts to make online grocery affordable for users across Tier 2+ markets, these changes will ensure we have the right framework in place to meet the growing needs of our customers," it said.

The integration will now provide the company's over 100 million Meesho users access to over 87 million active product listings across more than 36 categories on a single platform.