Zomato will soon launch 10-minute food delivery service, says founder Deepinder Goyal

ET was the
first to report on March 18 that the food delivery platform was in talks with restaurant partners

and cloud kitchens to pilot the 10-minute delivery service from Gurugram.

Goyal said the company will do 10-minute delivery through “a dense finishing stations’ network” located near 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,” he wrote in the blog post on the company website.

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The “finishing stations” will be about 700-1,200 square feet large. Zomato will use warehouses of Hyperpure (its business-to-business supplies business for restaurant partners) and rent new facilities in high-density areas, according to a company spokesperson.

The pilot will run from four stations in Gurugram from next month, it said.

The company has committed $400 million to
grow the quick-commerce category in India and
is in talks to merge with ultra-fast grocery delivery startup Blinkit, ET reported on March 15.

Zomato has already
approved a plan to lend $150 million to Blinkit in phases.

Goyal said customers were increasingly demanding quick delivery times and sorting by fast delivery was one of the most used features on Zomato.

“In addition to that, after becoming a frequent customer of Blinkit (one of Zomato’s investments in the quick commerce space), I started feeling that the 30-minute average delivery time by Zomato is too slow and will soon
have to become obsolete. If we don’t make it obsolete, someone else will,” Goyal said.

The company will build Zomato Instant based on eight principles, including deep collaboration with restaurant partners, traceable supply chain, and convenient packaging for quick and easy consumption.

The finishing stations, he said, will house bestseller items (about 20-30 dishes) from various restaurants based on demand predictability and hyperlocal preferences.

Goyal said that “due to demand predictability at a hyperlocal level… the price for the customer will get significantly reduced, while the absolute margin/income for our restaurant partners as well as our delivery partners will remain the same.”

While Goyal said delivery partners were not informed of the promised time of delivery and that time optimisation did not happen on the road “or put any lives at risk”, Member of Parliament for Sivaganga, Karti P Chidambaram said Zomato’s initiative was a “ten minute-long gamble with a gig workers life.”