Athira Sethu
Kochi, 11 November 2024
Food delivery platform, Zomato, will be introducing a new feature called “food rescue.” This is to minimize the amount of food waste that is usually caused by canceled orders. According to Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato, more than 400,000 orders of perfectly good food are cancelled everyday for various reasons. Such orders go to waste, of course-a source of concern both for Zomato and the restaurants.
The new “food rescue” feature will enable customers living near restaurants to buy cancelled orders at a very cheap price. The food will be sold in original packing, untouched, and delivered swiftly to these customers. According to Goyal, this is to prevent good food from going waste while still providing options that are available to people around the restaurant at affordable prices.
The initiative is part of Zomato’s efforts to reduce food wastage. Goyal said the company is trying to save food from getting wasted, even though orders get cancelled by the customer for a thousand different reasons. He also said that Zomato is looking to expand this feature to more cities in the future.
However, the present scenario of Zomato comes with controversy over its recent examination by the Competition Commission of India. It is being probed for unfair business practices by the CCI. Such business practices include altering how food reaches a customer’s table and altering rankings of restaurants in search results. The CCI also flagged the alarm on Zomato’s contracts which do not let restaurants discount, either directly or on other delivery platforms.
It has also been alleged that Zomato & Swiggy discriminate between big and small restaurants.
