Food delivery platform Zomato on Wednesday replaced its Zomato Instant with a new service named Zomato Everyday. Under Zomato Instant, which has been discontinued, the company offered deliveries for select food items within 10 minutes. Under the newly unveiled Zomato Everyday, it will offer affordable, home-style meals cooked by home-chefs.
Similar services are currently being offered by some other startups also like Cookr, FoodCloud and HomeFoodi, in limited regions/areas.
On the Zomato app, Everyday has been placed alongside the platform’s other offerings such as Intercity Legends, which is the company’s intercity food delivery service and Healthy, which is targeted at health-conscious consumers.
The chefs identified by Zomato will be on a contract with the company and will prepare food only for its customers from its premises, people in the know told FE. To begin with, Zomato Everyday will be available only at a select few locations of Gurugram and will take orders only between 8 am -11:30 am for breakfast and between 11:30 am – 3:30 pm for lunch.
Dinner orders are not covered under this service since the company found demand is not high for it.
Zomato currently has at least five home chefs and will onboard more after they have cleared thorough taste tests and met the universal taste threshold. Further, to maintain uniformity, Zomato will also allow users to pick the chefs they want food from and browse an Everyday menu of their choice. Orders on Everyday will be delivered in about 30-35 minutes.
“Eating well does not have to be expensive or time-consuming. With fresh meals starting at only `89, our customers can eat healthier and better daily,” Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO, Zomato said in a blog post on Wednesday. “Our food partners collaborate with the home-chefs, who design each recipe with love and care to serve you home-styled, wholesome food at the best prices within minutes,” he added.
Earlier in the month, while announcing its results for the October-December quarter, Zomato had said that it would relaunch the Zomato Instant under a new name, Zomato Everyday.
“…It’s (Zomato Everyday) not going to be asset-heavy, but we will have to open finishing stations to be able to service this food to customers. We are currently planning to experiment with the infrastructure that we had anyways built for Zomato Instant,” Akshant Goyal, chief financial officer, Zomato, had told analysts.
“…Depending on the offtake and what we learn from there, we’ll decide on how to expand going forward from there. Compared to Zomato Instant, it’s only going to be less capital-intensive than what Instant was.” He had said that the company will first pilot the offerings and be able to assess its success after a quarter.
Zomato’s consolidated revenue during the October-December quarter grew 75% to `1,948 crore on a year-on-year basis, while losses increased five-fold to `346 crore.
On Wednesday, Zomato’s shares closed down 4.25% at `53 at the Bombay Stock Exchange.