Online food delivery service provider Zomato plans to deliver food to its customers in record 10 minutes, following the footsteps of grocery delivery companies, Deepinder Goyal, the founder said in a blog on March 21.
"I started feeling that the 30-minute average delivery time by Zomato is too slow, and will soon have to become obsolete. If we don’t make it obsolete, someone else will," Goyal said.
"Innovating and leading from the front is the only way to survive (and therefore thrive) in the tech industry. And here we are… with our 10-minute food delivery offering – Zomato Instant," Goyal added.
According to Goyal, the fulfillment of his quick delivery promise relies on a dense finishing stations’ network, which will be located in close proximity to high-demand customer neighbourhoods.
The company will also depend heavily on dish-level demand prediction algorithms and in-station robotics to ensure that the food is sterile, fresh, and hot at the time it is picked by the delivery partner.
Zomato will house bestseller items - some 20-30 dishes across its finishing stations from the partner restaurants based on predictability.
It also claims that following the 10-minute model, the prices of the items will also get reduced.
"Due to demand predictability at a hyperlocal level, we expect that the price for the customer will get significantly reduced, while the absolute rupees margin/income for our restaurant partners as well as our delivery partners, will remain the same," Goyal said.
Zomato Instant as it will be called, will start a pilot with four stations in Gurugram from April.
The development happens at a time when Zomato is aggressively investing in food-tech and robotics startups. Last week it announced a $5 million investment in robotics company Mukunda Foods which designs and manufactures smart robotic equipment to automate food preparation for restaurants.
Before that, it invested in ad-tech firm Adonmo and B2B software platform UrbanPiper Technology as part of its larger plan to deploy $1 billion across startups.
Last week, it also extended a debt of $150 million to rescue cash-strapped quick commerce startup Blinkit.
Moneycontrol was the first to report that Zomato would invest around $100 million in the online grocer.
Blinkit last raised $100 million from Zomato in a round that gave the company a unicorn status.
