Valentine’s Day 2025: Lovers drive up quick commerce order volumes to record highs

Valentine’s Day 2025: Lovers drive up quick commerce order volumes to record highs

This Valentine’s Day, love was brewing on quick commerce and food delivery platforms like Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, and Zepto, as lovers splurged on romance, buying a record number of roses, chocolates, soft toys, and more.

The lover’s day surge in sales came shortly after these platforms posted record-breaking orders this New Year’s Eve.

“Our analysts have run the numbers, and the Valentine’s Day rush is mad!” said Phani Kishan, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer, Swiggy, in a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

“At peak, we saw 581 chocolate orders per minute, 324 rose orders per minute. If there was ever a stock market for love, this was the bull run,” he added. In fact, the company had sold twice as many chocolates than Valentine’s Day 2024 by 10:53 AM.

Moreover, orders for roses on Instamart increased 16-fold compared to a regular Friday.

Similarly, rival and quick commerce market leader Blinkit witnessed an early surge in demand for cakes, desserts, and more. The platform reported witnessing an increase in searches for keywords like ‘Valentine,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘gift hamper,’ as well as others like ‘lover’, ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, and ‘romance.’

On Blinkit, sales of rose-themed and/or flavoured dishes on Rose Day, February 7, surged twofold. In addition, delivery of rose-flavoured beverages also rose by 70 percent. Several restaurant partners and brands on the platform also introduced special Valentine’s Day offerings like heart-shaped cakes, donuts, cookies, tarts, French hearts, pizza and more.

“On Chocolate Day, February 10, over 125,000 chocolate-based dishes were sold. The newly launched chocolate fondue boxes are showing promising early sales figures,” the company said.

Likewise, Zepto witnessed a ten-fold increase in sales of gift hampers, necklaces and pendants, while soft toy sales shot up 6.21-times compared to last Valentine’s Day. The platform also saw a 5.14-times increase in perfume sales compared to last year.

"This Valentine’s season, we’ve seen a strong preference for classic and thoughtful gifts, with gift hampers, jewellery, soft toys, and perfumes among the most popular choices nationwide,” said Devendra Meel, chief business officer, Zepto.

“Traditional romantic gestures remain significant, as reflected in the continued demand for chocolates and roses. At the same time, the rise in luxury and self-care gifting points to a shift in consumer behaviour toward more personalised and experiential presents,” he added.

Zepto also reported a 3.17-times increase in chocolate sales compared to the previous year.

Chocolates turned out to be a big hit on quick commerce platforms. In fact, a Delhi-based user on Instamart placed as many as 24 orders during the day, spending Rs 29,844 to buy 174 chocolates.

It was not just quick commerce platforms making merry this Valentine’s Day. Food delivery players, too, launched new offerings on the occasion.

Rebel Foods, the cloud kitchen startup that runs brands such as Faasos, Oven Story, Behrouz Biryani and others, launched QuickiES – its own 15-minute food delivery service – in Mumbai, with free orders if it failed to meet its delivery deadline.

“In the India market, quick food delivery is the new reality…We anticipate that we should be able to fulfil a majority of our orders within that (15-minute) time frame. We have piloted it for the last few months, and were operating at a 90 percent plus success rate, which gave us a lot of confidence,” Sagar, Kochhar, co-founder and CEO, EatSure, Rebel Foods, told Moneycontrol.

This comes at a time when 15-minute food deliveries are picking up in a big way, with several companies jumping into the mix by launching their own quick delivery services.

“Because the entire ecosystem that we have built over the last decade has been focused on delivery, we had to make very minor upgrades and only a few additions in our kitchen infrastructure (to make 15-minute deliveries possible),” Kochhar added.

Like Swiggy, which recently rolled out a separate app for quick food delivery called Snacc, Rebel Foods has also spun off a QuickiES app, available for download for Android and iOS.

Through this service, Rebel Foods is offering popular dishes from its brands, as well as a new selection of “café-style snacks” such as samosas, idli, medu vada, pakoras, poha, puffs, instant noodles, sandwiches, hot beverages and a range of milkshakes.

Over the next month or so, the company will assess how 15-minute food deliveries fare across Mumbai, before potentially scaling up further in other metropolitan and Tier 1 cities.