- Zomato announced 10-minute food delivery service, Zomato Instant
- Zomato will run a pilot project in Gurugram from April
- Deepinder Goyal, Co-founder, Zomato says, “If we don’t make it obsolete, someone else will”
Zomato now wants to jump on the quick commerce wagon and deliver your food order in 10 minutes. Yes, just 10 minutes. Following the footsteps of Blinkit (which is also backed by Zomato), the company announced “Zomato Instant,” which will guarantee 10 minute delivery of 20-30 bestseller dishes from restaurants around your area. Zomato will test the 10-minute delivery service first in Gurugram in the coming days.
“After becoming a frequent customer of Blinkit (backed by Zomato), I started feeling that the 30-minute average delivery time by Zomato is too slow, and will soon have to become obsolete,” Deepinder Goyal, Co-founder, Zomato said in a blog post.
Goyal says that customers want their food as quick as possible, and they don’t want to plan or wait. And according to Goyal, “sorting restaurants by the fastest delivery time” is being used by customers the most.
In a nod to last year’s Grofers (now Blinkit) controversy, Goyal said that Zomato would not compromise the safety of delivery partners, and partners won’t be pressurized to fulfil Zomato’s 10-minute delivery promise.
“Before we even talk about this, we will start with a clarification – to fulfil our quick delivery promise, we do not put any pressure on delivery partners to deliver food faster. Nor do we penalise delivery partners for late deliveries. The delivery partners are not informed of the promised time of delivery. Time optimisation does not happen on the road, and does not put any lives at risk,” said Deepinder Goyal.
How does Zomato plan to deliver food in 10 minutes?
Zomato says that instead of risking the lives of delivery partners, Zomato Instant will rely on a dense network of finishing stations (delivery hubs). The model is very similar to the dark store model implemented by quick commerce startups such as Zepto, Blinkit and even Swiggy.
Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal said, “The fulfilment of our quick delivery promise relies on a dense finishing stations’ network, which is located in close proximity to high-demand customer neighbourhoods. Sophisticated dish-level demand prediction algorithms, and future-ready in-station robotics are employed to ensure that your food is sterile, fresh and hot at the time it is picked by the delivery partner.”
Each finishing station would have around 20-30 dishes based on the demand and preferences of customers in the area. And, Zomato will be using the existing data of 1.35 billion orders to help figure out the bestseller dishes in a particular area. Zomato will use sophisticated dish-level demand prediction algorithms and in-station robotics at each warehouse to ensure quick deliveries. Zomato will begin the pilot testing in Gurugram with four finishing stations from April.
Zomato says that the quick delivery model would help reduce the price for the customers by almost 50 per cent. It would also reduce the average delivery time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes.
