Swiggy expands Bolt to 500 cities a day after Zomato shutters 15-minute food delivery service

Swiggy expands Bolt to 500 cities a day after Zomato shutters 15-minute food delivery service

Food delivery major Swiggy on May 2 announced that it has expanded its in=app 10-minute food delivery service Bolt to over 500 cities across India.

The expansion comes a day after Moneycontrol was first to report that Zomato has shut down its 15-minute food delivery verticals Quick and Everyday, citing operational challenges.

Launched in October 2024, Bolt has quickly grown to 10 percent of Swiggy’s total food delivery orders, the company said. The service offers a curated menu of quick-service, high-demand items that have minimal or no preparation time from restaurants within a two-kilometre radius.

Besides local restaurants, Swiggy has partnered with popular quick-service restaurant chains like KFC, McDonald’s, Subway, Faasos, Burger King, and Curefoods.

“Bolt fits into the way people live today. You’re hungry, you want something now, and you don’t want to compromise. We built Bolt for that moment. Seeing it scale to 500 plus cities in just a few months has been incredible. And this is just the beginning,” said Rohit Kapoor, CEO, Swiggy Food Marketplace.

Much like Zomato’s now-defunct Quick service, Bolt is also prominently displayed on Swiggy’s landing page. As per the company, new users acquired through Bolt show 4-6 percent higher monthly retention than the platform average.

To ensure safety, delivery workers are not informed that an order is a Bolt one, and no incentives are tied to delivery speed, Swiggy stated.

The move 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.

While Zomato no longer offers a quick food delivery option on its main app, it has launched Bistro by Blinkit – a separate service offering fast-moving, ready-to-eat dishes made in Blinkit's network of dark stores. The app focuses on snacks, small meals, and bakery items that can be dispatched rapidly, blending Blinkit’s quick-commerce infrastructure with Zomato’s food delivery know-how. Swiggy also operates a similar service called Snacc.

Moreover, others like Magicpin, BigBasket, Ola, Swish and Zing have also jumped into the quick food delivery market, signalling intensifying competition in the segment.