The quick food delivery market in the country will be driven by innovation and expansion into newer categories and use cases, Rohit Kapoor, CEO of Swiggy Food Marketplace told FE on Monday.
“The work cut out for us is to find out how to make more and more categories relevant for delivery,” he said, adding that use-cases like cakes and lunch currently need more innovation for quicker deliveries.
Kapoor said that 4-5 years ago, tea and soup seemed difficult to deliver. But now, with innovation in packaging, they have become highly-ordered categories.
“Geographical expansion is not a lever anymore,” he said.
Kapoor emphasised that the quick food delivery is here to stay and the company is committed to building it.
This comes at a time when Swiggy’s main rival Eternal (formerly Zomato) has shut down its similar offerings Zomato Quick and Everyday citing low demand. Company CEO Deepinder Goyal said that they did not see a path to profitability in these offerings without compromising on customer experience.
Its quick commerce arm Bistro, however, continues to operate its quick food delivery business Bistro.
Swiggy has two quick food delivery offerings – Bolt and Snacc and is bullish on both.
Under Bolt, the company offers 10-15 minute food delivery through restaurants located within 2.5 kms from the customer. Launched in October last year, it has already expanded to over 500 cities and contributes around 12% to Swiggy’s overall food delivery volumes. Kapoor said that in some locations, this is over 20%.
Moreover, new users acquired through Bolt have shown 4-6% higher monthly retention than the platform average.
For Snacc, the company uses a mix of centralised kitchen and partnership with brands to deliver snacks in 10 minutes. It was launched earlier this year and is currently live in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru. It will go live in Pune soon.
“We are open to more partnerships but the framework will remain the same,” he said. This includes keeping the platform simple for users and offering only those SKUs which can be delivered fast.
“These kind of filters will be much more applied on Snacc,” he said, adding that its still early days for the platform and it is finding its product-market fit.
In the January-March quarter, Eternal said that it faced shortage of delivery personnel due to increased demand in the quick commerce sector. Kapoor, however, said that Swiggy did not witness much shortage.
In April and May, he said, there is usually a shortfall of these personnel every year as they go back to native places for harvesting. The shortage starts to ease by the end of May.
“There is nothing new that we have seen this year,” he said. “If anything, this year has been slightly better.”