Zomato might now be one of India’s most valuable 50 companies, but it’s continuing to innovate like a startup.
Zomato is testing out a new feature in which it allows people to buy orders that have been prepared, but cancelled by the users who’d ordered them. Zomato is now offering these orders to users who’re nearby and might want to have them.
X user Param Sharma shared a screengrab of the cancelled order update in a post. He was presented with a pop-up which said “Flash sale” and “Food rescue” on a rotating packed Zomato bag. “An order was just cancelled. Claim at Rs. 2̶6̶0̶ Rs. 130,” it said. The order could be delivered in 5 minutes. “Claim in 6:35 minutes to reduce food wastage,” Zomato said. Zomato specifies that the food is freshly prepared and safely sealed.
Sharma told OfficeChai that he saw the pop-up on his home screen which offered him the chance to buy the cancelled item. He’s based in Bengaluru.
At Zomato’s scale, it must get many orders that are cancelled after they’ve been prepared. Instead of letting this food go to waste (or straight to the delivery partner), Zomato seems to be letting people in the vicinity of the delivery partner buy it at a significant discount. This could be a win-win — Zomato makes money from the order, while someone who wants to have the food can have it at at a reduced price.
Zomato has brought out a slew of innovations like these in the food ordering space. Many years ago, Zomato had experimented with Infinity Dining which allowed people to eat as much food as they liked for a fixed fee. Zomato had then acquired a drone startup to deliver food to people quicker. In recent times, Zomato has implemented a group ordering feature allowing large groups to manage their Zomato orders, and also implemented an order scheduling feature. Zomato had also fulfilled a long-standing demand of customers by having a dedicated veg-only fleet, and even installed 650 rain gauges in cities to be able to determine if weather conditions would allow deliveries to take place.
And Zomato might need to keep developing these features to maintain its dominance in the food ordering space. The Indian government’s ONDC is now available on mainstream apps like Paytm and Ola, and users can order food from these apps often at cheaper prices than Zomato. Zomato, however, has much superior ordering and support experience, and with these new features, can look to retain users on its platform. But what’s most impressive is how quickly Zomato is implementing new initiatives — 16-year-old companies can often get staid and bureaucratic, but Zomato seems to still be zipping along with the velocity of a recently-founded startup looking to raise its Series A.