Zomato at 10 Minutes: A Look at Mega Plan to Deliver Momos, Biryani in 10 Minutes

Zomato’s 10-minute delivery plan: Zomato’s 10-minute delivery will be launched in Gurgaon next month. The company has announced that the quick delivery service will rely on a dense network of “finishing counters”, which will be located in near high-demand customer neighbourhoods.

The food delivery app has noted that it will ensure that the food is “sterile, fresh and hot at the time it is picked by the delivery partner” by using “sophisticated dish-level demand prediction algorithms and future-ready in-stations robotics”. The development comes only a few days after Zomato acquired robotics startup Mukunda.

However, a day after the announcement was criticised by some as an open door to push delivery partners into a tough and unsafe working environment, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal read out the fine print of the food-ordering app’s latest 10-minute delivery service.

Zomato’s 10-min Delivery Explained

The company will fulfil quick deliveries out of a “finishing stations’ network” located in close proximity to high-demand customer neighbourhoods. To begin with, there will be four such stations in Gurugram as part of the pilot.

Zomato’s finishing stations seem similar to the dark store model used by quick commerce firms like Zepto and Blinkit, which gives these companies greater control and influence over the operational chain.

Zomato said it was expecting the model to help reduce the price for the end customer by around 50 per cent, while the absolute income for its restaurant partners and delivery workers will remain the same.

Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal, said, “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.”

Called Zomato Instant, Goyal in a blog post said, nobody in the world has so far delivered hot and fresh food in under 10 minutes at scale, and the company is eager to be the first to create this category, globally.

Goyal tweeted explaining the 10-minute delivery service “will be for specific nearby locations, popular and standardised items only.” Zomato is hopeful of delivering food to customers in 3-6 minutes with the delivery partner riding at 20 kilometres per hour.

“Hello twitter, good morning. I just want to tell you more about how 10-minute delivery works, and how it is as safe for our delivery partners as 30-minute delivery. This time, please take 2 minutes to read through this (before the outrage),” Goyal tweeted this morning.

He said Zomato delivery partners are not informed about the promised delivery time for both 10- and 30-minute deliveries.

“No penalties for late deliveries. No incentives for on-time deliveries for both 10- and 30-minute deliveries,” Goyal said on a Twitter thread. “We are building new food stations to enable to 10-minute service for specific customer locations only,” he added.

What do You Get in Zomato’s 10-min Delivery?

Zomato will house bestseller items – some 20-30 dishes across its finishing stations from the partner restaurants based on predictability. It also claims that following the 10-minute model, the prices of the items will also get reduced.

“Yes, we will also serve you Maggi through our 10-minute food stations,” he added, alluding to memes that compared Zomato’s ultrafast service with Maggi’s “2-Minute Noodles” brand identity.

On a question about what items could customers expect in 10 minutes, Goyal replied, “Bread, omelette, poha, coffee, chai, biryani, momos, etc.”

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