Zomato on Wednesday rolled out a new offering under which the food aggregator will deliver its users affordable and home-cooked meals in 10-15 minutes. This move comes at a time when the Temasek-backed company is facing a downturn and aims to revive its food delivery business.
The new initiative Zomato Everyday is actually a pivot of its 10-minute food delivery service Zomato Instant.
Early this month, the Gurugram-based company announced Zomato Everyday, along with its earnings report for the third quarter of the ongoing fiscal.
Targeted towards students and working professionals living alone in metro cities, the new service will offer home-style cooked food items worth as low as Rs 89 barring the delivery charges, Zomato said in a statement.
By opting Zomato Everday, customers can choose for breakfast and lunch options between 8 am to 11:30 am and 11:30 am to 3:30 pm, respectively. The food will be prepared by home cooks.
As of now, the service has been started only in Gurugram. The company also aims to soon launch the pilot in Bengaluru as well.
“We are currently planning to experiment with the infrastructure that we had anyways built for Zomato Instant. We are using the same finishing stations to roll this out in the next few weeks in Gurugram and Bengaluru,” said Zomato’s chief financial officer Akshant Goyal, in an earnings call early this month.
It is important to note that Zomato’s key rival Swiggy had once offered a subscription-based daily home-cooked food via a separate app Swiggy Daily. However, it pulled the plug on the service in September 2020 after running it close to a year due to weak demand.
Goyal had blamed macroeconomic conditions and industry slowdown for the sluggishness in the business in the quarter that ended in December 2022. It had reported a four-fold increase in its net loss from Rs 63.2 crore to Rs 346.6 crore year-on-year, mainly owing to the industry-wide slowdown in the food delivery business.
