MUMBAI: As rapid services catch up to food aggregator platforms, Ant Group-backed Zomato Ltd intends to deliver food in 10-minutes, according to the company’s founder Deepinder Goyal.
“After becoming a regular client of Blinkit (one of Zomato’s investments in the rapid commerce market), I began to believe that Zomato’s 30-minute average delivery time was excessively slow and that it would soon have to be phased out.” Someone else will make it obsolete if we don’t,” Goyal wrote in the blog post.
“The only way to survive (and thus grow) in the tech business is to innovate and lead from the front,” he continued. And here we are… with Zomato Instant, our 10-minute food delivery service. From next month forward, Zomato will test Zomato Instant with four stations in Gurugram, he said in the blog post.
With the grocery delivery market heating up, platforms like Swiggy Instamart, managed by Bundl Technologies Pvt Ltd, Ola Dash, handled by Ola’s parent ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, and Zepto, run by Kiranakart Technologies Pvt Ltd, among others, are promising 10-minute deliveries.
Goyal’s news comes just days after it was revealed that Zomato is in talks to merge with quick delivery firm Blinkit (formerly Grofers) in an all-stock deal worth between $700 million and $1 billion.
Zomato, meanwhile, has been attempting to break into the fast grocery delivery market. Zomato began a rapid commerce firm in 2020 during the first Covid-19-induced lockdown, but it shut down after a few months. Following that, the corporation made advances into the space by investing in Blinkit. To date, the business has invested more than $100 million in Blinkit.
