Tata and Tesco's Star bet on Indian grocery — 16 years on, it had 57 stores

Star is a nationwide supermarket chain run by Trent Hypermarket (THPL), the joint venture between Tata's Trent and Britain's Tesco

That a Tata-Tesco joint venture could win Indian grocery retail — building scale, formats and supply chains against Reliance Retail and DMart

Tesco paid $140 million for its 50% stake in THPL in March 2014

Trent, the Tata retail arm founded in 1998 and chaired by Noel Tata, launched Star with an ambitious 2004 inception into modern grocery. The turning point was supposed to be March 2014, when Tesco — one of the world's largest grocers — paid $140 million for half of THPL a decade into the chain's existence.

By the year ended March 2020, Star's topline was Rs 1,235 crore ($165 million) — 3.6% of Reliance Retail's grocery revenue and just 5% of Avenue Supermarts' sales — on 57 stores, against Reliance Retail's 797 and DMart's 214. The chain was loss-making and had struggled to find the right store size throughout.

Sixteen years in, the joint venture never found the store format that works: the swing from 50,000 sq ft hypermarkets to 2,000 sq ft stores signals a format search that never concluded.

It stayed sub-scale while Reliance Retail and DMart compounded: 57 stores and Rs 1,235 crore of topline could not generate the supply-chain economics the leaders enjoyed.

The JV entered consolidation late — by 2020 the field already held Reliance, DMart and a Future Group negotiating its exit, leaving Star fighting for the leftovers.

Pedigree is not scale: in grocery, a decade of format-search without a winning format just donates the market to whoever committed earlier and bigger.

As of August 2020, Star was loss-making but still standing, betting on value-retail positioning and cluster expansion to bring supply-chain costs down — with The Ken judging that without scale, survival itself was the question.