Over the weekend, as the world celebrated the New Year, cloud kitchen and foodtech platforms braced themselves for a long night. As more people ordered pizzas and biryanis for their parties and New Year's Eve celebrations, platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato reported record numbers.
Swiggy delivered more than 1.3 million orders on New Year's Eve as of 6.25 p.m., and that number continued to rise. Biryani, pizza, cake, burgers, and dosas topped Swiggy's list of the top five most ordered dishes. Swiggy tweeted at 10:25 p.m. on New Year's Eve that 61,287 pizzas had been delivered. Swiggy delivered 3.5 lakh biryani orders, according to PTI.
ALSO READ: New Year’s Eve: Swiggy delivered lakhs of biryanis, but there were takers for khichdi too
Compared to last New Year's Eve, Swiggy's orders from tier-2 cities increased threefold. There was a 46 percent increase in traffic from tier 2&3 cities compared to regular days, which resulted in 49 percent more orders being placed by customers from these cities. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai were the top five cities by order volume.
Swiggy said that over one lakh new restaurants participated on New Year's Eve and that restaurant-driven cancellations were minimal even during the peak.
Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, stated that the company reached last year's orders-per-minute (OPM) levels at 6.40 p.m. Zomato's OPM was over 7,100 last year.
ALSO READ: Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal steps out to deliver orders on New Year’s Eve. See his post
Customers' love for biryani was also evident, as evidenced by Swiggy's top-ordered food of the night. Swiggy claimed in a tweet that Hyderabad's Bawarchi restaurant had prepared 15,000 kg of biryani.
A similar pattern was observed on Zomato. Goyal tweeted at 6.52 p.m. that 16,514 biryanis were being delivered.
“@biryanibykilo looking at the no. of orders run, maybe you should consider changing your name to biryani by tonnes,” Swiggy had tweeted.
Biryani By Kilo confirmed this as well, and founder Vishal Jindal told Moneycontrol that the biryani and kebab cloud kitchen made Rs 2 crore in sales on New Year's Eve, as well as their highest-ever sales in December 2022. He went on to say that they saw good growth in December compared to October and November 2022 levels.
Curefoods, which runs brands such as Eatfit, Junos Pizza, Yumlane, Nomad Pizza, and Cakezone, processed 70,000 orders on December 31, 2022, according to founder Ankit Nagori. He stated that the brand received 1.1 million orders in December.
He added that in December, Curefoods saw the highest revenue and order volume. “I see a lot of tailwinds on online ordering, and this year Curefoods is expecting to hit the 2 million orders a month mark,” Nagori said.
Anshul Gupta, founder of Eatclub, which operates brands such as Box8 and Mojo Pizza, stated that NYE's business was 2.5 times that of a typical day.
“The surge in December in the last two years was exceptional, as people were celebrating at home mostly, and not travelling on vacations as much. Now when things have opened up, it seemed more like pre-covid levels,” he said.
He added that pizzas and biryani did much better compared to other categories.
Wow! Momo CEO Sagar Daryani said that the company's business increased by 80 percent by NYE compared to last year. “Sales on Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year sales were excellent. We did some record-breaking numbers on all three days. Whatever number I did on a monthly basis when I raised my first round of funding through the Indian Angel Network in 2015, that same number I did in a single day,” Daryani told Moneycontrol.
Industry sources also said that cloud kitchens did fewer numbers in December as people preferred to eat out.
Daryani said Wow! Momo did see a decline in delivery sales in December as people are going out and eating out more.
“For us, we have a hybrid model so dine-in and takeaway was excellent. In a normal month it’s 48 percent vs 52 percent between delivery and dine-in, but this month it would have been 35 percent delivery and 65 percent dining in and takeaway. It’s very logical that cloud kitchens would be having lesser sales because in December there are festivities, people like going out, and when people do go out, the eating out consumption is higher,” he said.
Anurag Katriar, the founder and CEO of deGustibus Hospitality which runs restaurants such as Indigo Deli and Moveable Feast, said dine-in numbers were excellent on NYE. “In Q3, the trend [in dining in] has seen a big uptick. In fact, very provisionally speaking, December this year is 31-33 percent higher than last year,” he said.
“Dining out per se is all about the experience. I think people are in the mood to go out and celebrate and that’s why you see a spike in dining in and a corroborative drop in the delivery business,” he added.
Quick commerce
In addition to an increase in food orders, Swiggy and Zomato also saw an increase in orders in the quick commerce space.
On New Year's Eve, milk, mixers such as soda and tonic water, chips, cold drinks, and curd were the five most-ordered items via Swiggy's quick-commerce platform Instamart.
Swiggy Instamart delivered over 1.76 lakh packets of chips, 13,984 packets of nachos, 14,453 lemons, and 14,890 sodas, per the company's Twitter account.
Albinder Dhindsa, CEO of Zomato-owned Blinkit, stated that one out of every three orders in Delhi included a cold drink. At 9:27 p.m. on New Year's Eve, he tweeted that Blinkit had delivered three times as many orders as it had the previous year.
Tweets by Dhindsa showed a spike in orders of tonic water, soda, soft drinks and ice cubes, as well as peanuts. The largest party order of the day came from a Bengaluru customer, who placed a Blinkit order worth Rs 28,962.
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