Customers who order food via food delivery apps are sick of waiting for countless hours before their orders arrive at their homes or offices. They also find out that the tracking on the app gets moved and moved. They can’t wait longer.
Two food delivery platforms, Zomato Quick and Swiggy’s Bolt, are working to make 10-minute food deliveries possible. Delivery in 10 minutes? That right. You read that right.
Zomato Quick has always owned the 10-minute food delivery mantra. However, recently, this service has shut down. You will find out more in our report.
Meanwhile, Bolt, as the name implies, is Swiggy’s answer to that 10-minute delivery craze. Bolt features a selection of incredibly popular dishes, such as burgers, hot and cold beverages, breakfast items, and even Biryani that require minimal preparation time. Also available are ready-to-pack, ready-to-eat dishes such as ice cream, sweets, and snacks.
The demand for this 10-minute delivery is massive! Who would not choose to go for this option, even if you need to pay more?
However, while both those food delivery giants – the other being a former giant – are pursuing the 10-minute food delivery to the tee, they are implementing opposing strategies for this. However, both persistently respond to a sector-wide slowdown and mounting pressure on customer experience and infrastructure.
Swiggy’s Bolt is up and running, live across a staggering 500 cities and more in around six months. This can be seen with the over 45,000 restaurant brands and accounts it has under its wing, which accounts for a percentage of its entire delivery orders.
Meanwhile, Zomato, did a distinct move. Before the shutdown of Zomato Quick, there was a lack of incremental demand from this feature, so the 10-minute delivery took place. It was launched as an experiment to compete with Swiggy Bolt, which interestingly, was the first to offer this gimmick.
“The current restaurant density and kitchen infrastructure are not set up for delivering orders in 10 minutes, which leads to inconsistent customer experience,” Zomato’s parent, Eternal, stated in its quarterly shareholder report yesterday.
The Ridesharing Forum team previously reported how Eternal is rebranding to entice more customers to choose their platform.
This is quite an interesting maneuver, since several companies now, like ridesharing in Southeast Asia, are partnering together. For instance, Grab owns several ridesharing platforms in the region under its belt.
But those two food delivery companies are taking two different directions.
To cap these off, here’s the take from Deepinder Goyal, the CEO of Eternal: "What we’ve realised is that this [– bringing down delivery time to 10 minutes –] is extremely hard, and we don’t see any incrementality in demand if we do that, given that the customer experience is poor.”
Goyal added that, however, he is aware of the obvious difference between 10 and half an hour, so for him and the company, they must “try to bring that 30 minutes down to maybe 20 or 25 minutes over time by making our overall logistics fleet and delivery system more efficient.”
“Those are the gains we want to chase now, rather than trying to build an extremely quick service, which, without end-to-end control of the supply chain, we think is extremely hard to do,” he noted.