What's on the Menu?

Food-tech companies are ramping up payment options to help customers tide over the cash crunch.

- Angad Singh Thakur

On the evening of November 8, Nitya Sharma, cofounder of the payments firm Simple, was seated in his company’s Mumbai office when the news broke. “Somebody read it on WhatsApp and came and told us,” he says. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, in a televised address, announced that currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations would cease to be legal tender at the stroke of midnight. As Sharma, who has spent most of his career working in finance, grappled with the broader economic implications of the announcement, it was easy to glean what it meant for his company.

Within no time, transactions on the platform were skyrocketing. And for good reason. Sharma’s company, Simpl, underwrites small, frequent payments that users make at its partner merchant platforms, primarily food-tech ones like Holachef, FreshMenu and Faasos. For instance, if you place an order and select the ‘Pay Later’ option, Simpl will pay the merchant on your behalf and allow you to settle it within two weeks at no extra cost.

While the concept of cash on delivery (CoD) has always presented Indian ecommerce with multifarious problems—lack of change, possibility of theft or pilferage and even logistics—the ubiquity of cash in the Indian economy and the culture of using it made CoD indispensable. “That’s because it acts as a lubricant for trust. And in an evolving market like India, you need cash to build trust,” says Sharma.