India has taken to 10-minute grocery deliveries in a big way, but 10-minute food deliveries might be a different story.
Zomato has shut down its 10-minute delivery service Quick. Zomato had launched Quick a couple of months ago, and promised deliveries in 10 minutes. But Quick has been shut down, along with its home-like meals service Everyday.
“We are shutting down both these initiatives as we are not seeing the path to profitability in these without compromising on customer experience,” Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said. “The current restaurant density & kitchen infrastructure is not set up for delivering orders in 10 minutes which leads to inconsistent customer experience. As a result, we did not see any incrementality in demand while we ran Quick as an experiment for a few months,” he added.
“With Everyday, we realized that the need for homely-meals is a limited use case largely for office locations in metros. We did not see enough ROI by keeping it running at a small scale,” Goyal added.
10-minute grocery delivery had become all the rage in India after Zepto had pioneered the concept back in 2021. As all manner of companies had pivoted to 10-minute deliveries, companies had also begun experimenting with 10-minute food deliveries. Zepto had launched Zepto Cafe, while Blinkit had launched Bistro. Swiggy, meanwhile, had launched Snacc, and Zomato had launched Zomato Quick as an option within its app.
But Zomato has now said that it’s seeing no incremental demand for the service given the selection and customer service they’re able to provide while delivering food in 10 minutes. This could be a sign for other companies in the space as well — Zomato is the biggest player in the food delivery space, and has the deepest collaborations with restaurants. If it feels that there’s no demand for super-quick deliveries, other startups might independently reach the same conclusion. There might still be demand for packed items and coffee, but Zomato at least seems to be saying that there might be no need to deliver dosas and rolls, as it was doing with Quick, in 10 minutes.