Zomato, Swiggy’s New Hunger

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • 10-minute food delivery is the new battlefield for Zomato and Swiggy, as the two companies enter another phase in their longstanding rivalry.
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Zomato and Swiggy walk into a bistro, ask to see the menu and the kitchen, have a ‘Snacc’ or two while taking a peek into the sales register, and simply walk out. That would be the beginning of a joke, except restaurants aren’t happy about being the punch line.

Even though both giants have clarified that Bistro and Snacc, their new food delivery models, are not competing with restaurants, this just masks how they both arrived at these models.

If we have to believe the claims of these two giants, they both launched identical 15-minute food delivery products without relying on the playbooks written by other restaurants that have worked with them over the years. That seems a little too hard to digest, especially as the writing was on the wall already for the past few months.

Whatever said and done, this is the new battlefield for Zomato and Swiggy, as the two companies enter another phase in their longstanding rivalry. We dive into the cafe wars this Sunday, but after a look at the top stories from our newsroom this past week:

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The New Face Of Food Delivery

On the face of it, the 15-minute delivery services seem new and fashionable, but in reality they have been in the making for the past year.

Swiggy and Zepto both launched ‘cafe’ services in Bengaluru and Mumbai respectively way back in 2023, but neither of these experiments took off in any meaningful manner. It was only after the success of quick commerce models after this point that added more conviction to these models.

Since mid-2024, plans for cafe delivery operations went into overdrive. Here’s a brief look at the chronology:

  • Swiggy launched 10-15 minute delivery services under the name Bolt in October. But unlike Snacc or Bistro, this utilised existing restaurant partners on Swiggy’s platform
  • Zepto then announced that it is separating Zepto Cafe from the main app and spinning it off to scale it up away from the quick commerce operations
  • Zomato followed up with 15-minute food delivery model from restaurants in a 2 km radius similar to Bolt
  • Then Swiggy launched Snacc also selling fast food, beverages and prepared meals from nearby locations
  • And Zomato-owned Blinkit then did the same with Bistro, similar to both Zepto Cafe and Snacc
  • Besides this, we saw the launch of individual delivery startups such as Bengaluru-based Swish, and most recently Zing in Gurugram
  • Moreover, the likes of Magicpin and Ola Consumer have also launched quick food delivery leveraging the Open Network for Digital Commerce

This has created a huge groundswell for instant food deliveries and given a new headache for restaurants. Not only do they have to partner with the likes of Zomato and Swiggy, but also compete with them to a certain extent.

Swiggy claims that Bolt contributes 5% to its overall food delivery volumes with availability in over 400 cities. Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha claimed Zepto Cafe order volumes have grown from 30,000 orders per day in December to 50,000 orders in early January.

Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa clarified that parent company Zomato will never launch private brands on the main app to compete with its restaurant partners, which is why the Bistro app is launched by Blinkit and is separate from the Zomato app.

Restaurants Raise Alarm Again

But this seems like a thin explanation when one considers that Zomato and Bistro are both under the same roof, and will naturally share plenty of resources and knowledge. If nothing, Bistro will benefit from Zomato’s expertise and talent depth in food delivery.

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