How Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto are achieving disruptive 10-min food deliveries

Food delivery apps in India are promising to bring biryani to hot beverages at customers’ doorsteps in under 10 minutes, as competition for impatient consumers intensifies among digital platforms.

At least five companies, including Zomato Ltd. and its recently-listed rival Swiggy Ltd., have unveiled or announced plans to offer quick food delivery in the last few weeks.

But how they do it varies: Zomato unit Blinkit’s food delivery app Bistro and Zepto Cafe are relying on in-house kitchens to swiftly cook and assemble eatables, while Swiggy is partnering with restaurants from Starbucks Corp. to McDonald’s Corp.

While doorstep delivery has existed in India for decades with mom-and-pop stores employing runners, the last few years have seen a disruptive transformation. Technology helped spawn startups offering ultra-fast deliveries and these were lapped up by an affluent, smartphone-savvy, urban population keen on instant gratification.

The result was apps like Zepto and Blinkit, which deliver eggs to earphones — even iPhones — at a breakneck pace while similar services typically take a few hours elsewhere in the world.

‘Impulsive Buyers’

“Quick commerce has changed consumers who have become more impulsive buyers,” said Karan Taurani, senior vice president at Elara Securities India Pvt. These platforms have now rolled out rapid food deliveries to satisfy these impulses and “enhance user experience.”

Swiggy and Zomato’s blistering success has not just upended the Indian retail sector, it has cast them as stock market darlings. Swiggy shares have surged 53% since listing last month while Zomato has jumped 133% this year.

As India’s 10-minute mania enters the food delivery segment, brokerages see a new growth avenue while some consumers worry about the quality of food cooked in such a dash.

India’s online food delivery market is expected to more than double to $15 billion by March 2029, according to a Dec. 18 report by JM Financial. Platforms had penetrated only about 11% of the country’s total food consumption in 2023, compared with 40% in China and 58% in the US, it said.

“Bistro’s within-10 minutes-delivery proposition should help the company better penetrate breakfast and evening snacks meal consumption” in the bigger Indian cities, analysts at JM Financial Ltd. led by Swapnil Potdukhe wrote about Zomato in the report.

Zepto Cafe, which was the first to begin 10-minute food drops in 2022, is adding 100 cafes a month and clocking 30,000 orders a day, its founder Aadit Palicha wrote on X in a Dec. 11 post.

It’ll now face competition from Zomato’s Bistro, Swiggy’s Bolt, Dash by Ola Consumer and Magicpin’s MagicNOW. The Tata Group-owned BigBasket said this week it is in the process of finalizing the service.

These nippy services are already finding takers. Bolt accounts for 5% of Swiggy’s total food delivery orders within two months of its launch, Sidharth Bhakoo, chief business officer of food marketplace at Swiggy said in an email. “We see it touching 10% of all food delivery orders at some point in the near term.”

The speedy meals comes amid health concerns and rising obesity in India. The country is among the largest consumers of junk food, spurred by increasing availability of packaged food and lax food safety regulations.

‘Lost My Mind’

“Cook time 2 min, delivery time 8 min. A ‘qcom for food’ founder told me this and I lost my mind. We are suffering from the biggest epidemic of poor nutrition and unhealthy processed and ultra processed food which is high on palm oil and sugar,” Shantanu Deshpande, founder of Bombay Shaving Company said in a Dec. 16 linkedin post. “And now this.”

The companies offering these speedy meals reassure the food quality won’t be compromised.

“At Bistro, we are not microwaving processed frozen food and sending it to our customers,” Zomato said in an emailed response on Dec. 18. “When you order from your nearest Bistro kitchen, we make dishes fresh by putting together ingredients that are prepared at a central kitchen.”

Food is prepared in “controlled environments to maintain quality” and “high hygiene standards are enforced at every stage—from sourcing to final delivery,” Shashank Shekhar Sharma, who leads Zepto Cafe, said in an email. There’s also rigorous training for the staff and routine inspections, he added.

Maintaining delivery times on India’s busy and bumpy roads will be a challenge, according to Elara’s Taurani. Scaling up with a limited food menu is another, he said.

But that’s not holding back service providers, including Swiggy which has expanded Bolt to over 400 cities.

“Consumers just love things faster,” Rohit Kapoor, Swiggy’s chief executive officer for the food marketplace said in the Dec. 3 earnings call, describing Bolt as “a big bet.” “We’re very optimistic about the potential it holds for not just this offering but the future of food delivery itself,” he said.