The quick commerce battle is rapidly moving into the food space.
Zepto and Blinkit have made moves towards their 10-minute delivery food delivery options on successive days. Yesterday, Zepto had announced Zepto Cafe, which delivered food in 10 minutes. Today, Blinkit appears to have launched an app named Bistro which will similarly deliver food in 10 minutes.
“We’re launching a separate app for Zepto Café next week!” Zepto CEO Aadit Palicha had posted yesterday on X. “The team is shipping an MVP and iterating quickly, so it may not be perfect on Day 1, but it’s worth it to launch fast 😀 Café is scaling rapidly: we’re launching 100+ Cafés a month and already clocking 30K orders/day,” he had added. Palicha had added a screenshot of the Zepto Cafe app, which seemed to be waiting for approvals on the App store.
But Today users discovered that Zepto’s arch rival Blinkit too appears to have launched its 10-minute food delivery app. Named Bistro, the app is already live on the Play Store. It’s already been downloaded over a thousand times, and has a rating of 4.8 after 24 reviews. Bistro says it’ll deliver delicious food in minutes, and offers more than 50 dishes including Adrak Chai, Indori Poha and croissants.
Interestingly, the third player, Swiggy, already has a 10-minute food delivery app available named Swiggy Bolt. Swiggy Bolt is already available in 400+ cities and towns in India, and delivers over 10 lakh food items through 40,000 participating restaurants. “Designed for speed, Bolt focuses on dishes that can be delivered without compromising on taste, freshness, or quality,” Swiggy had said in a press release last week. Swiggy said that it had partnered with restaurants to optimize order prioritization for Bolt orders, which only had food items with minimum or no preparation time. It had added that delivery partners were not told which orders were ordered through Bolt and which were regular orders to prevent reckless driving — it indicated that Swiggy had optimized the order flow with restaurants to make sure orders reached users in 10 minutes.
Swiggy, Blinkit and Zepto are each converging on the 10-minute food ordering space from different starting points. Zomato and Swiggy already have large food delivery operations, so they likely already have relationships with restaurants to be able to quickly launch 10-minute food delivery. Zepto doesn’t have a dedicated food ordering arm, but had earlier made snack deliveries available through its main app, so it appears to be extending that with a separate app in Zepto Cafe. All these companies vociferously compete in the quick commerce space, and now appear to be making moves in the 10-minute food delivery space which they clearly seem to believe is ripe for the picking.
Strategically, it would make the most sense for Zepto to push heavily on food delivery. Zomato and Swiggy will likely cannibalize a portion of their regular orders to 10-minute delivery, but food delivery can be a whole new greenfield operation for Zepto. Additionally, 10-minute food delivery helps all these players stand out from ONDC, which offers food delivery in regular times. These are frenetic times in India’s food delivery space, and with several competitors competing over services, discounts, and delivery timings, the Indian consumer has never had a better chance to have their cake and eat it too.