Siddharth Jhawar, a vice-president at Zomato who was in-charge of its recent foray into intercity food delivery service, has left the company. Jhawar said he is headed to Tiger Global-backed adtech unicorn Moloco where he will run the company’s India operations.
Prior to leading Zomato’s Intercity Legends service, he also headed its Wings programme that sought to connect restaurants with investors.
“Zomato gives opportunities that are extraordinary. No mountain can be too high to climb and your past credentials don't limit the size of your opportunity. I got mine to build a new business from scratch - it was so much fun, especially because of the people around me,” he said in a LinkedIn post on Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, Kamayani Sadhwani, a director at Zomato-owned quick commerce company Blinkit, has taken over from Jhawar as the head of the intercity food delivery service. Before joining Blinkit earlier this year, Sadhwani worked at Coca Cola India, Bain, Accenture and McKinsey.
After being piloted for select users in Gurugram in August, the inter-city food delivery service is being expanded to other cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai.
Moneycontrol had reported in September that the inter-city service’s average order value was seen to be over Rs 950 – around 2.5 times that of the company’s intra-city food deliveries. Moreover, 30 percent of the users ordering on any day were repeat customers while the average user rating is 4.3.
Zomato plans to expand its inter-city food delivery feature to about 5-10 cities over the next few months but not without an eye on profitability. While its intra-city food delivery service broke even in June quarter after starting in 2015, the food delivery firm expects the inter-city version to break even much faster.
“We are conscious of responsibly scaling up Inter-city Legends so that it is cost-efficient… It will not be years till this service breaks even,” said Rahul Ganjoo, chief executive officer of Zomato’s food delivery vertical.
The supply side of the inter-city service boasts of 120 restaurants from 10 cities including Kolkata, Lucknow, Bengaluru, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Chennai.
Every inter-city order placed before 4:30 pm on a particular day is packed and ferried to a central hub of the supply-side city in the evening. It is stored in a refrigerator that cools down the food to 5-10 degrees celsius and is air-transported the next morning and delivered at the customer’s doorstep by 6 pm in the evening.
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