Reducing delivery time creates incremental demand for restaurant food: Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal

As 10-minute food delivery takes the segment by storm, Zomato chief executive officer Deepinder Goyal on Monday said bringing down delivery time creates incremental demand for restaurant food, citing data.“For example, when we started managing last-mile delivery for restaurants (compared to restaurants delivering orders themselves earlier), we were able to bring down delivery time from 45+ mins to ~30 mins, which led to meaningful expansion in demand on our platform,” he said, adding that 10-15-minute deliveries can have the same effect.

Zomato and its rival Swiggy have launched standalone apps for 10-minute food delivery in January: Blinkit’s Bistro and Snacc, respectively. The Noida-headquartered company had experimented with Zomato Instant earlier but shut it down as it couldn’t find the right economic model.

“Our learning here was that 10-minute deliveries would be possible only if we ensure kitchen networks are dense (and thereby cut down travel time), while also bringing down kitchen preparation time. Doing this consistently and profitably is not an easy problem to solve,” Goyal explained.

How will it go differently with Bistro? The CEO said infrastructure would be the solution. “This market is currently addressed by on-site vendors/vending machines and is not catered to evenly across geographies by the existing food delivery options. Bistro is working to solve this by creating infrastructure and working with food researchers, producers, chefs, and restaurants to provide a proof of concept,” he said.

The instant food delivery space has suddenly caught on in the past few months, with Zepto and new apps like Swish entering the market. Swiggy also has its Bolt service, Zepto operates Zepto Cafe and Zomato facilitates deliveries under 15 minutes through its app.

Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha said earlier in January that its rapid food delivery segment is registering 50,000 orders per day.The companies have also had a run-in with the restaurant body National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), with the body planning to move India’s antitrust regulator over 10-minute delivery apps. NRAI expressed concerns that Zomato and Swiggy may potentially use data to build their private food delivery brands without the involvement of restaurants.