Rapido’s food delivery platform Ownly has expanded beyond its pilot neighbourhoods in Bengaluru and is actively planning launches in other metro cities, the company said during a townhall hosted by the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) on Thursday.
Vivek Vashishta, head of new initiatives at Rapido, told restaurant partners that the platform — which has been running a pilot in Koramangala, HSR Layout and BTM Layout since mid-August — has now operationally launched across the whole of Bengaluru and will soon begin a marketing push to drive customer acquisition in the city. “You’re going to be seeing, especially across Bangalore, Ownly on your phones, Ownly splashed across your city as a brand,” Vashishta said.
On multi-city expansion, Vashishta said the platform cannot afford to stay in one city for too long. “
From Pilot to Pan-City
People know that they can isolate us in this one city — that we don’t really mean business,” he said, adding that while Ownly will take time to scale across Rapido’s 600-city network, while tier-1 cities and select tier-2 and tier-3 cities are “very definitely in the plan.”
The townhall marked a significant shift in Ownly’s commercial pitch to restaurants. In earlier iterations, Ownly had agreed to a three-tier delivery fee structure, under which restaurants bore most of the delivery cost — Rs 59 for orders above Rs 400 and Rs 29.50 for orders between Rs 100 and Rs 400, with a split burden for orders below Rs 100. As reported by FE, this model had created friction during the pilot, with restaurant partners flagging concerns over having to absorb packaging costs of Rs 5-10 per order on top of matching offline menu prices, all while seeing limited user adoption on the platform.
Ownly has now arrived at a model where restaurants pay nothing. “There are absolutely no charges to restaurants. There are no commissions, there are no marketing fees, there are no subscription fees,” Vashishta said, adding that the cost of delivery would now be borne entirely by customers through a per-kilometre fee. During the pilot the delivery fee was waived off for customers.
Pranav M Rungta, vice-president of NRAI, framed the shift as an unbundling exercise.
Unbundling the Cost
“What’s been happening in the industry so far is we’ve been sort of bundling all our costs and putting that on to the customer. When you set a price which is listed on your delivery platforms, this price has included the cost of commission which you are paying to the current aggregators, and you have bundled in the cost of advertisement and visibility and everything else,” Rungta said, urging restaurants to unbundle their pricing for the model to work.
On how Ownly intends to make money, Vashishta was candid: “In the beginning, we’re not going to be earning money.” He said the platform would eventually charge customers a small margin over the delivery cost. “Instead of saying that we’ll take Rs 10 from 100 customers, we are asking the question — can we take Rs 2 from 1,000 customers,” he said.
Vashishta also committed to building a platform without discounts, positioning price and product as restaurants’ only levers. “Discounts are something that, unfortunately, customers have gotten used to in the last 20-25 years online. We want to find an alternate path. It goes against everything I have been taught in my e-commerce career, but we want to take this step,” he said.
On operations, Vashishta said Ownly would deploy two fleets — a dedicated food delivery fleet and the broader Rapido rider network. Initially the platform will prioritise using the dedicated fleet as they have undergone specific training on handling food delivery orders. The platform has completed integrations with POS systems including Urban Piper, and Rista, amongst others. He also said restaurants would not be charged for visibility or customer data, and that Ownly would bear liability for delivery mishaps.