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zomato

Zomato – A Popular Food Delivery Giant In India.

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One of the most popular on-demand meal delivery services, Zomato, enables consumers to find restaurants and have their food delivered right to their door. It is the go-to food delivery platform for the majority of Indians and continues to be the first choice of people when it comes to restaurant searching.

About The Company

Founded in 2008, Zomato is a popular food delivery giant in India. It is a platform that links customers with delivery services and restaurant partners to meet their various demands. Customers use Zomato to find restaurants, order food delivery, reserve a table, and pay for meals when dining out. Headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, Zomata now has a presence in over 24 countries including the UK, US, and Australia.

zomato
Image source: www.india.com

History

When Zomato was founded it was initially named FoodieBay. However, in 2010 the founders of the company renamed it Zomato in order to avoid any trademark issues with eBay. In 2011, the company expanded its domestic operations across major cities in India like Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Ahmedabad. Later in 2012, it also increased its international presence by launching its operations in countries like the UK, South Africa, Qatar, UAE, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. In the next 1-2 years, it expanded itself globally across many nations including Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, etc. The company entered the USA and Australian markets in 2015, by the acquisition of an American restaurant discovery platform Urbanspoon. Zomato’s entry into the USA put it in direct opposition to other services with similar business models, like Yelp and Foursquare. Later on, in the same month, it bought Mekanist, a restaurant discovery platform in Turkey. In February 2015 as part of an effort to diversify its income beyond restaurant listing, It launched an online payment system called Zomato Cashless in affiliated restaurants in Dubai. However, the company discontinued this payment service after a few months.

In 2015, Zomato began its food delivery services by partnering with Delhivery and Grab. The idea was to provide delivery services to restaurants that lacked their own delivery service. In 2017, it launched Zomato Gold, a paid membership service that allowed users to receive deals and discounts on dining out and food deliveries at Zomato-partnered restaurants. In 2018, Zomato became a ‘unicorn’ by raising 200$ million through Ant Financial which valued the company at 1.1$ billion. In the same year, Zomato bought WOTU( rebranded as Hyper pure), which is a B2B platform, in its effort to supply restaurants with food ingredients like meat, vegetables, and grains from the company’s warehouses.

In 2020, as a result of the Covid pandemic and increase in demand for online groceries, Zomato introduced Zomato Market across 80+ cities in India. However, in June 2020 Company shut down its Zomato Market initiative as the business wasn’t scalable. In 2021, Zomato became India’s first unicorn to go public by offering its IPO( Initial public offering) in the stock market.

Acquisitions

Over the past few years, Zomato has acquired many local and international startups like Menu-Mania, lunchtime.cz, obedovat.sk, Gastronauci, Cibando, Urbanspoon, Mekanist, MapleGraph, NexTable, Sparse Labs, Runnr, TongueStun Food, TechEagle Innovations. In 2018 Zomato bought TechEagle Innovations, which specializes in drones, thus working towards a drone-based food delivery system in India. Other popular acquisitions include UberEats and Grofers. In 2022, It approved the acquisition of Blinkit, a grocery delivery platform, in an all-stock deal worth Rs. 4447 crores.

Founders – Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah

Zomato was built by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008 as a platform called “Foodiebay,” which listed restaurants and food.  Both the founders met while working at a company called Bain Consulting. They both are graduates of IIT-Delhi. By 2011, what had initially been a small concept had become a one-stop destination for anyone searching for restaurant recommendations, reservations, ratings, reviews, and other information.

Zomato

Founder Of Zomato Explains How Instant Food Delivery Works.

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After announcing its 10-minute food delivery service, dubbed Zomato Instant, on Monday evening, popular food delivery app Zomato received a barrage of negative feedback on social media. Zomato, a new fast-food delivery service, claims to be able to deliver your order in as little as 10 minutes, but there’s a catch. Your food orders will not all be delivered in ten minutes. From next month, the Zomato Instant service will be available at four locations in Gurugram.

Deepinder Goyal, the company’s founder, said on Tuesday that the 10-minute delivery service will be limited to items that are “popular, standardised, and can thus be dispatched within 2 minutes.”

In response to a Twitter question, the founder of Zomato highlighted the types of food that can be delivered in 10 minutes. According to him, the Instant service will deliver items such as “bread omelettes, poha, coffee, chai, Biryani, momos, and many more” within 10 minutes. If you order noodles, fried rice, or pizza, in that case, the delivery time will be increased to 30 minutes or more, depending on the distance.

Delivery Partners’ Safety

The food delivery app was trolled and questioned shortly after announcing the Zomato Instant service, for not taking the safety of its delivery partners seriously. Goyal clarified in a recent Twitter post that the company will continue to educate delivery agents on road safety. In one of his tweets, Goyal stated, “We continue to educate our delivery partners on road safety, and we also provide accidental/life insurance.”
He also said that delivery partners would be kept in the dark about the promised delivery date. This, he believes, will relieve the delivery agent of any additional stress. Goyal also stated that there will be no penalties for late deliveries.

Zomato
Image source: i0.wp.com

Delivery Times Of 10 Minutes And 30 Minutes Are Compared.

Goyal shared a chart in a Twitter thread comparing 10-minute and 30-minute deliveries. Three major factors for deliveries are mentioned in the table: kitchen preparation time, the average distance travelled, and average time travelled.

According to the chart, a 10-minute delivery requires at least 2 to 4 minutes of kitchen preparation time, whereas a 30-minute standard delivery requires at least 15-20 minutes. The graph also shows that for a 10-minute delivery service, Zomato is opening stations closer to the customer’s location by 1 to 2 kilometres. In the case of standard 30-minute delivery, the distance from the customer’s address is 5 to 7 kilometres.

As a result, delivery partners will take 3 to 6 minutes to deliver the food at a 20 kilometre per hour average speed, whereas standard delivery can take up to 15 to 20 minutes.

Why Is It That Food Is Delivered In Ten Minutes?

Customers are increasingly demanding faster responses to their needs, according to a statement from the online delivery platform. They don’t want to plan ahead of time, and they certainly don’t want to wait. One of the most popular features of the Zomato app is sorting restaurants by fastest delivery time. Furthermore, after becoming a frequent customer of Blinkit (one of Zomato’s investments in the quick commerce space), the company believes that Zomato’s 30-minute average delivery time is too long, and thus plans to launch its own delivery service.

What Are The Chances Of This Happening?

Based on demand predictability and hyperlocal preferences, each of Zomato’s finishing stations will house bestseller items (20-30 dishes) from various restaurants. “Zomato has certain data about the customers—age, location, restaurants they eat at, favourite dishes, and so on. With the previous data, the company can predict the trends on how many probable orders could come at any given point in the future,” Rajath Ratnakaran, a data analyst, explained.
If Zomato Instant works as planned, it will have a significant impact on affordability (at least a 50% reduction in cost to the end customer), accessibility (delivery time will be reduced from 30 minutes to under 10 minutes on average), and quality (with control over the supply chain, we will be able to ensure highest grade ingredients and hygiene practises across the supply chain), according to the company.

copia

Copia : Founder Komal Ahmad Solving Hunger with Technology

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Two people sitting inside a restaurant orders the food of four, but can’t finish it. They pay for the food and leave the left-over on the table. What will happen to the left food? Obviously, the restaurant will throw it in the garbage. But is it right to do so? Komal Ahmad, the CEO of Copia, does not agree with that too. Throwing the food away is not the solution when many people out there are homeless and cannot afford a one time meal. But how to reach out to these people? Of course, there are many charitable organisations that partners with restaurants and other firms, to get the food, but these organisations have also rules about the food they accept.

While studying international health and global development at the University of California, Berkeley, Ahmad found it disgusting how the management used to throw the leftovers near the mess. Meanwhile, she met a former army man, who had just come back from Iraq, begging for food on the streets. He was waiting for his finances to come but had no money to buy food. Ahmad took the man for lunch, but a one-time meal could not fix the whole problem of wastage of food and poverty.

She thought of taking the leftover food from the mess to such needy people, but the process had many management rules to follow. This way, not even the home-less could have that food nor the charitable organisations would accept it. But Ahmad was too determined to solve this problem and with her college management produced new ways to donate the food to the needy. But this was not it. She knew that the problem is even bigger, and they need to manage all the food in the world. But there is a lot of difference in thinking and doing.

Komal Ahmad Copia
Image Source: generalassemb.ly

After digging deep, Ahmad decided to mix the technology with her food management plan. She was aware that there are many online car rental and food delivery services. So her idea was to get a similar app for picking up the wasted food and deliver it to the person in need.

She has mentioned a few times in her interviews that she finds the food-wastage problem as “literally the world’s dumbest problem.” Since she wanted to expand the idea of saving the food from wasting, she hired a development team, to develop a similar app, like Uber and other delivery services, where the working of the app was a bit different. Through the app, the corporate cafeterias, hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses would book a pickup for the wasted food, and a delivery guy would pick it up and deliver it at a place where it is needed the most.

Finally, in 2016, Ahamd founded Copia, a non-profit company at the beginning, and an app for accessing the service. She put all her life-savings into the startup and with her team participated in the Y-Combinator accelerator program, where she learnt how to manage a business. Along with that Copia received a $120,000 in exchange for 7% of the company from Y-Combinator.

Since she was not from a business background, Ahmad had to learn a lot. She had devoted all her time to her startup, so she had to make the company a for-profit firm by charging a small fee from the restaurant or others who wanted to donate their food. In fact, the donors get the enhanced tax deduction of up to 15% of its fair market value. So they are also a profit. At the delivery, the donor gets full receipt and pictures as proof. The app includes a testimonial from the receivers like non-profits, as well as data analytics service too.

The delivery guys on Copia are mostly homeless people. There are eight permanent employees at the company, and around 200 people have been delivering the food as a part-time delivery person. The platform is responsible for recovering 900,000 pounds of food and feeding up to 2 million people a year. During the Superbowl event in San Francisco in 2016, the company fed 24000 people in two days.

In 2016, at the Women in the World Salon in Los Angeles, Toyota named Ahamd one of the company’s “Mothers of Invention” and awarded her a $50,000 grant to fuel the startup.

Komal Ahmad is happy how the company has grown in the past three years and want to include clothing, medicine and blanket supply into the service shortly. She also wants to expand the service in major cities of the U.S., and later, to the other parts of the world. According to some reports, the German and Austrian governments also contacted Ahmad in the same regard.

The inspiring startup story of Ahmad gives us hope for humanity and another example of how technology can help one change things in a better way.

eatstreet

EatStreet : One of the Most Successful Startups Not From the Silicon Valley

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We can call it laziness or the extra money we have that we use to pay people to deliver things on our doorsteps. Today, a countless number of startups are providing the delivery services, and we just need to pay a small fee for that. But sometimes, these service providers charge an amount that is not justified, and we are only annoyed. This is the same case happened with the co-founders of EatStreet when they got the idea for their first and the most successful startup. Matt Howard, Eric Martell, and Alex Wyler, the students of the University of Wisconsin–Madison founded the company when they had to pay extra fee for food delivery despite being college students.

Eric Martell and Alex Wyler were computer science students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One day during their internship, Martell felt hungry and ordered food through campusfood.com. As soon he placed the order, he received a call from the delivery guy telling him that it would have been way cheaper if he had simply ordered through the phone call. This made Martell frustrated as even he was a student, he paid extra money for the delivery.

Martell discussed the incident with Wyler and came to the conclusion that they should build a similar website, that would provide free deliveries. This way, there were high chances for their idea to work, and they would also get good points to add in their resume. They could make the website run by themselves, but they needed a marketer to reach out to the restaurants for promotions. So they decided to join Matt Howard in, who was studying economics and political science major at the university. He had also got some experience in selling cars. So he seemed to be the perfect fit for the promotions.

EatStreet Founders
Image Source: wisc.edu

Finally, the three founded EatStreet as BadgerBites on 1 February 2010. Initially, it became difficult for them to convince the restaurants, but slowly the business came on track. In fact, in nine months, the company was making 100-200 deliveries every day, through about 70-80 restaurants in the city. In 2011, BadgerBites won the G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition and got a $10,000 prize as well as free office space in 2011. It also won the third prize in the NEST competition, held at the university. Winning those competitions not only helped the co-founders to get money to support their business but also access to some good entrepreneurs who have been mentoring them to date.

The success of the service encouraged the three to expand it to other cities as well. They built different websites for different cities, expanding the service to the cities that had more colleges or had universities. After running around 15 different websites for BadgerBites, the three co-founders launched a single website with the name EatStreet, and combined the services of the fifteen into one, on 21 January 2013. This way, they started to expand the service nationwide. By now, all three had to focus entirely on the service leaving other works behind. Matt Howard became the CEO of the company, Eric Martell held the position of COO, and Alex Wyler was appointed as the CTO of EatStreet.

The same year, in February, EatStreet hosted a series A funding led by and raised a sum of $2.45 million. The company was also named as #2 “Food Delivery Startup to Watch” in the U.S. by StrategyEye. The next year, the company became a part of the National Restaurant Association, in order to promote the digitalisation in the food industry. The company even partnered with Yelp, such that users could make orders through Yelp directly.

In April 2014, EatStreet raised another $8.4 million in a Series B investment round, Cornerstone Opportunity Partners LLC, Independence Equity, Great Oaks VC, CSA Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, being the major investors.

The three co-founders won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in the Midwest in 2015. By the C round of the funding, they were sure that the business is going to get real big, and they need to work on their data game.

In 2017, Howard and Wyler got featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology list. Martell stepped down from the post of COO to focus on his passion to help people build businesses in the same year. By the series C funding, the company had raised a sum of around $26 million. And at the same time, 200 corporate employees, as well as 800 delivery guys, had joined the company. The company processed around orders from 1.7 million customers in the year of 2017.

Today, the company has expanded to over 15,000 restaurants in over 150 cities in the U.S. The company, today, operates the orders and deliveries through its app, website, Facebook page as well as through the restaurants’ custom websites. EatStreet intends to reach around 350 to 400 cities across the U.S. by 2020.

Tony Xu : The Co-founder of the Dashing Food Delivery Service ‘DoorDash’

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The food industry is blooming with every second that passes. Now that the food industry has got technology-induced in it, one can order any kind of food, anytime, anywhere. It requires nothing but a simple three taps on your tech-savvy devices. In this growing food industry, DoorDash emerges as a key company leading the change. Tony Xu, the founding CEO of the company shares a success story which speaks that a simple problem can turn on the light in our minds to figure out something innovative.

DoorDash Inc. is an on-demand food delivery service which was founded in 2013 by Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, Tony Xu and Evan Moore. The founding story of DoorDash, as described by Tony, is an ‘unlikely one’.

It was 2012, and all four of the founders were working on an app which focused on building the technology for small businesses. They used to go and talk to the owners of coffee shops and restaurants. It all started when they were in a small macaroon store, in Palo Alto. The manager of the store, Chloe, expressed all the problems in her day to day business. However, as they were about to leave, Chloe showed them a thick booklet, which contained pages of delivery orders, and said, “This drives me crazy. I have no drivers to fulfil them, and I’m the one doing all of it.”

Tony Xu
Image Source: Bloomberg

All four of them had their lightbulb moment. They spent the next few weeks interviewing and questioning other small businesses (nearly 200) and heard the same thing over and over again: ‘Deliveries are painful’. They started coding keeping in mind that they can improve this backlog and were ready with their first prototype within a few hours.

On January 12th, 2013, Palo Alto Delivery was born. The service spread so quickly that all the four members were delivering all over the Stanford campus. In the day, they were students and, in the night, they were delivery drivers. The name ‘Palo Alto Delivery’ was changed to DoorDash, in June 2013, and the delivery drivers were called the ‘Dashers’. “We learnt so much from driving in the streets. Now, anyone who joins the company, has to be a Dasher for at least 1 week,” said Xu.

“When we first started, we were trying to solve our own problems of getting food delivered. But soon, it grew quickly within the Stanford community and beyond. We found out that many families and office workers in the area have the same problem. When we deliver food, it’s as much about delivering happiness as it is about bringing convenience,” DoorDash posted on Medium.

Tony Xu, is a first-generation American. His first job was at his mom’s restaurant. His education includes B.S. (High Honours) in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from UC Berkeley, M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was an Arjay Miller Scholar at Stanford. He started his professional career at McKinsey and Company. After that, he worked in Product at Square and led special projects for CEO and CFO at eBay.

When he started DoorDash, his simple mission was to enable every merchant to deliver easily, and that mission has come a long way. DoorDash has drawn investments worth $700 million with key investors being: Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Kleiner Perkins Caufield, and Byers. During 2018, the company was valued at $1.4 billion in a round of funding.

In April 2018, DoorDash stepped into the grocery deliveries with a partnership with Walmart. Further, in the year, DoorDash surpassed Uber Eats to become the second largest company in US food delivery sales behind only GrubHub.

The company took everyone by surprise when its valuation took place in February 2019. The company’s value increased 5 times and valued $7 billion when the rounding was done by SoftBank, Vision Fund, DST Global and Y Combinator.

Tony Xu, has also kept the focus of the company on an issue very important to him personally. Project DASH was launched and has since focused on the efforts to save food from wastage.

“Today, more than four and a half years after we first launched the company, we’re still passionate about transforming local businesses helping them thrive in this digital and convenient economy.” Tony Xu, the founding CEO is leading his company with its dashing food delivery services to new heights and is setting an example in front of the world that if innovation stays, then progress to success will always be on the tracks.