Middlemen versus middlemen in agri-food supply chains in Bengaluru, India: Big data takes a byte

•Persistence of small retail may lead to shifts towards distributor-led monopolies.•Digital technology reorganises relationships and agency of actors in food chains.•Functioning of digital technologies is emplaced and situated.•Analyses of e-commerce include spatialities and heterogeneities of existing markets. One of the most common complaints of food supply chains (FSCs) is that of exploitative middlemen and retail chains that dominate markets to disenfranchise farmers, small retailers and consumers. Scholarship on agro-food geographies has paid close attention to some of the issues and institutions in FSCs, attending to the role of capital and variations in the spatial practices of their functioning. It has been less attentive to the implications of newer, emerging forms taken by interventions along the food supply chain by emerging distribution-led food businesses that leverage data technologies to streamline and expand their influence. Based on qualitative research conducted of seven food-based Business to Business (B2B) e-commerce firms in Bengaluru, India, this research brings together scholarship on agro-food geographies, digital technologies and embeddedness in economic activity to unpack the rise of modern FSCs in India, paying special attention to the introduction of data technologies in their functioning. We argue that digital and physical market spaces rest on each other, digital technologies being firmly emplaced in their functioning through active processes of network and territorial embedding by B2B firms. This results in a respatialisation of the relational and material elements of these chains. We also critically interrogate wider transformations that this new set of actors precipitate. These include: 1. the reshaping of power relationships and consequently agro-food geographies through a consolidation of capital around distribution rather than retail 2. the role of data technologies in shaping practices and narratives in FSCs and 3. implications of these shifts for allied infrastructures.