Zomato pauses 15-minute food delivery service 'Quick' four months after launch

Zomato discontinues 15-minute food delivery feature on main app

Zomato has quietly removed Quick, its 15-minute food delivery tab, from its main app just four months after rolling it out, hinting at a possible strategic reset in its approach to ultra-fast meal deliveries.

The feature, also available as part of Zomato Everyday, was heavily advertised on the landing page of the main app but is now unavailable in several cities such as Bengaluru, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Mumbai and more. It is also possible that Zomato does not entirely phase out the feature and may release another version later.

The service, which appeared as a dedicated section on Zomato’s explore page, offered ready-to-eat dishes from select restaurants located within a two-kilometre radius. The option, however, is no longer visible.

"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.

The company's top-deck has, in fact, previously hinted that these quick delivery formats may not be a viable feature.

“I don't think any of this has had a material impact on Zomato restaurant aggregation food delivery business so far. All these initiatives (any form of 10-minute delivery in India today), are still at a very early stage and are not likely to move the needle at all, even if you aggregate and put them together,” Zomato’s chief financial officer Akshant Goyal had said while announcing the company's Q3FY24 results.

Zomato Quick was reportedly accounting for nearly 8 percent of the total order volume on the app around March.

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Second attempt

This was Zomato’s second attempt to crack the quick food delivery market under its main app. Its earlier effort – Zomato Instant, launched in 2022 – promised 10-minute deliveries in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR but was wound down by January 2023.

It was later replaced by Zomato Everyday, a home-style meal service with similar delivery timelines. However, that tab too has now disappeared from the app.

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 followed suit a month later with Snacc - its own dedicated app for fast meal deliveries.

Nevertheless, scaling quick food deliveries has admittedly been a challenge for Zomato. In an interview with Moneycontrol in October last year, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said that finding restaurant partners was a hurdle.

“Zomato Instant was not the right product market fit (PMF). Zomato Everyday, which is 10-minute deliveries, has a slightly better model…We're adding some canteen type food to that (Zomato Everyday). Simple samosas, puffs, cream rolls and others which can be delivered in 10 minutes,” he had said.

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.

Blinkit followed with Bistro in December, while others like Magicpin, BigBasket, Ola, Swish and Zing are also vying for a share of the fast-food-on-demand pie.

With Bistro by Blinkit now live as a standalone service, Zomato appears to be shifting its quick-food ambitions away from its core app and into a more focused play powered by Blinkit's dark store network. Rather than juggling both models in one place, the company may be looking to separate rapid-fire snacking from full-fledged restaurant orders.

For users, that means 15-minute puffs and croissants aren’t off the menu – they’ve just found a new home.