The 10-minute food delivery war enters India: How do Zepto, Blinkit and others deliver eggs to your earphones at breakneck speed?

India’s food delivery app promises to deliver biryani to customers’ doorsteps in 10 minutes as competition heats up among digital platforms for impatient consumers.

In the past few weeks, at least five companies, including Zomato Ltd. and its recently listed rival Swiggy Ltd., have unveiled or announced plans to offer fast-food delivery services.

But they do it differently: Zomato-owned Blinkit’s food delivery apps Bistro and Zepto Cafe rely on in-house kitchens to quickly cook and assemble food, while Swiggy partners with restaurants such as Starbucks Corp. and McDonald’s Corp.

While home delivery has been around in India for decades, with mom-and-pop shops employing runners, recent years have seen a disruptive shift. Technology has spawned startups offering ultra-fast delivery services that appeal to an affluent, smartphone-savvy urban population obsessed with instant gratification.

The result is apps like Zepto and Blinkit, which deliver eggs to headphones and even iPhones extremely quickly, whereas similar services elsewhere in the world often take hours.

“Impulse Buyer”

“Quick commerce has changed consumers and they have become more impulsive,” said Karan Taurani, senior vice president, Elara Securities India Pvt. These platforms are now launching fast food delivery to satisfy these impulses and “Enhance user experience”.

The runaway success of Swiggy and Zomato has not only disrupted the Indian retail industry but also made them stock market darlings. Swiggy shares have soared 53% since listing last month, while Zomato has gained 133% this year.

As India’s 10-minute craze moves into food delivery, brokerages see new avenues for growth, while some consumers worry about the quality of food cooked so quickly.

India’s online food delivery market is expected to more than double to $15 billion by March 2029, according to a Dec. 18 report from JM Financial. The report said that by 2023, platforms will only penetrate about 11% of China’s total food consumption, compared with 40% in China and 58% in the United States.

“Bistro’s 10-minute delivery proposition should help the company better penetrate breakfast and evening snack consumption in India’s big cities,” JM Financial Ltd. analysts led by Swapnil Potdukhe said of Zomato in a report.

Zepto Cafe is the first cafe to offer 10-minute food delivery services starting in 2022. Its founder Aadit Palicha wrote in an 30,000 orders.

It will now face competition from Zomato’s Bistro, Swiggy’s Bolt, Ola Consumer’s Dash and Magicpin’s MagicNOW. Tata Group-owned BigBasket said this week it was finalizing the service.

These fragile services have found takers. Bolt accounted for 5% of Swiggy’s total food delivery orders within two months of its launch, Sidharth Bhakoo, Swiggy’s chief commercial officer for food marketplace, said in an email. “We expect it to reach 10% of all food delivery orders in the short term.”

India’s health problems and growing obesity problem coincide with the fast food era. The country has become one of the largest consumers of junk food due to an increase in the availability of packaged food and laxer food safety regulations.

“Lost your mind”

“Cook time 2 minutes, delivery time 8 minutes. A Qualcomm Foods founder told me this and I lost my mind. We are suffering from the worst epidemic of malnutrition and unhealthy processed and ultra-processed foods, These foods are rich in palm oil and sugar,” Shantanu Deshpande, founder of Mumbai Shaving Company, said in a December 16 LinkedIn post. “Now this.”

Companies that offer these fast food products guarantee that food quality will not be compromised.

“At Bistro, we do not microwave processed frozen food and send it to customers,” Zomato said in an email reply on December 18. It was prepared by the central kitchen. “

Shashank Shekhar Sharma, head of Zepto Cafe, said in an email that the food is prepared in a “controlled environment to maintain quality” and that “high hygiene standards are implemented at every stage from procurement to final delivery” . Strict training and routine inspections of employees are also conducted, he added.

Maintaining delivery times on India’s busy and bumpy roads will be a challenge, Elara’s Taurani said. Expanding a limited food menu is another story, he said.

But that hasn’t deterred service providers, including Swiggy, which has expanded Bolt to more than 400 cities.

“Consumers are liking things faster,” Rohit Kapoor, CEO of Swiggy Food Market, said during an earnings call on December 3, describing Bolt as “a big bet.” . “We are very optimistic not only about the potential of this service, but also about the future of food delivery itself,” he said.