Swiggy is betting big on its rapid food delivery vertical, Bolt, calling it a key lever for both market expansion and increased consumer stickiness in the medium term, the company said in a shareholder letter announcing its Q4 FY25 results.
The company’s bullish stance on ultra-fast food delivery contrasts sharply with rival Zomato, which recently shut down its 15-minute food delivery initiatives, Quick and Everyday, citing a lack of infrastructure and no visible path to profitability.
“Bolt provides our restaurant partners a full-stack, scaled-up route to participate effectively in the quick-food delivery space,” Swiggy's management said in a letter to shareholders. The service, now live in over 500 cities, clocks more than 12 percent of Swiggy’s total food delivery order volumes. The company highlighted that new users acquired through Bolt show 4-6% higher monthly retention than the platform average, and that the offering’s margin structure is not dilutive due to its hyperlocal two-kilometre delivery model.
Bolt offers a curated selection of fast-moving, minimal-prep items from over 45,000 restaurant brands and QSR chains like McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Faasos, Burger King, and Curefoods. Swiggy said it collaborates with restaurants to ensure sub-5-minute prep times and maintains rider safety by not tying incentives to delivery speed.
“Bolt has grown at a fast clip and contributes 12 percent of overall order volumes today,” said Swiggy Food Marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor, during the company's Q4 FY25 earnings call. “This is a category by itself… we are building it very purposefully and thoughtfully.”
Swiggy’s chief rival Zomato has hit a strategic reset in its approach to ultra-fast meal deliveries, recently shutting down its 15-minute food delivery services Quick and Everyday, Moneycontrol was the first to report.
"We are actually shutting down both these initiatives (Quick and Everyday) as we are not seeing the path to profitability in these without compromising on customer experience," Zomato Group CEO Deepinder Goyal said in a letter to shareholders while announcing the company's Q4 FY25 results.
"The current restaurant density and kitchen infrastructure is not set up for delivering orders in 10 minutes which leads to inconsistent customer experience. As a result, we did not see any incrementality in demand while we ran Quick as an experiment for a few months," Goyal added.
Zomato has instead launched 'Bistro by Blinkit' – a fast-food vertical operating through Blinkit’s dark stores, similar to Swiggy Snacc.
This comes at a time when the 15-minute food delivery space is seeing a flurry of new entrants. Zepto, which pioneered the category with Zepto Café in 2022, now fulfills over 100,000 daily orders through its standalone app – translating to a $100 million annualised GMV, CEO Aadit Palicha recently revealed in a social media post.
Moreover, others like Magicpin, BigBasket, Ola, Swish and Zing have also jumped into the quick food delivery market, signalling intensifying competition in the segment.
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