Zomato's 'The Fast And The Furious' Step

The 10-minute food delivery model could upend India’s quick-commerce space and propel the ‘one-stop deliverer’ concept

- K. Sunil Thomas

PUTTING THE ‘FAST’ in fast food is the flavour of the season. Recently, food aggregator giant Zomato launched a 10-minute food delivery service. For now, it is confined to Zomato’s affluent home base of Gurugram, but it plans to scale it to other cities soon.

“Nobody in the world has so far delivered hot and fresh food in under 10 minutes at scale and we were eager to be the first to create this category, globally,” said Deepinder Goyal, cofounder & CEO of Zomato.

The move to inject the white-hot business model of quick commerce into food delivery seems to have shaken up India’s burgeoning e-commerce space. Delivery of grocery and essential items within 10 minutes or so is already a thing, pioneered by startups like Zepto and Blinkit (formerly Grofers) and also by the likes of Reliance’s JioMart and Tata-owned big basket. Meanwhile, Zomato’s rival Swiggy, which already has a thriving instant grocery delivery model, is reportedly planning to extend it to food as well. And, Bhavish Aggarwal has also turned his attention to the model with Ola Dash.

But as one analyst quipped: are we counting our chicken biryanis even before the eggs are hatched?

“Is there a demand for food delivered within 10 minutes? I don’t think thousands of people wrote in saying that if you don’t deliver in 10 minutes, we will stop ordering,” said Rashmi Daga, founder of cloud kitchen chain FreshMenu. “Consumers need to be educated on the costs associated with demanding speed. We are just creating undue pressure on everyone around us.”

When Goyal announced Zomato’s 10-minute delivery model in a blog in March, it was criticised for putting delivery agents under undue stress and causing traffic problems.