Zomato has launched a pilot of an inter-city delivery service called ‘Legends’ which will allow select users in parts of the National Capital Region to order food from restaurants in Kolkata, Hyderabad, Lucknow and other cities.
This comes months after the company announced a 10-minute food delivery pilot in Gurugram which has not yet been piloted elsewhere.
“Food is freshly prepared by the restaurant and packed in reusable and tamper-proof containers to keep it safe during air transit. State-of-the-art mobile refrigeration technology preserves the food without the need to freeze it or add any kind of preservatives,” the company said.
“We will rapidly scale this to other cities in the next few weeks… With over 100 airports and a rich spread of the most iconic dishes that India has to offer, the sky is the limit to how big Intercity Legends can become,” it added.
Meanwhile, the company has started grocery pilots in Delhi-NCR with recently-acquired quick commerce company Blinkit. It has integrated the Zomato app with the Blinkit back-end to enable grocery orders from the food delivery app itself.
The company has seen its food delivery business growth sputter over the last few quarters due to a significant base effect, efforts to improve profitability and macroeconomic headwinds like inflation. Over the past year, the food delivery platform’s quarterly gross order value has grown around 42 percent to Rs 6,430 crore.
However, in its first quarter result announcement on August 1, Zomato said its food delivery segment had hit break even with an adjusted EBITDA of 0. It had registered an adjusted EBITDA loss of Rs 80 crore in the March quarter and a loss of Rs 30 crore in the year-ago period in this segment.
At its first annual general meeting after going public, the company said today that it expects to achieve operating profit break-even by the next one year at a company level.
Zomato shares are currently trading at a discount of over 20 percent to the issue price of Rs 76 apiece in its initial public offering (IPO) last year. While the stock was listed at a premium of 66 percent on its market debut and hit an all-time high of Rs 169 apiece, the hoopla was short-lived as the scrip fell 8 percent on the day the anchor lock-in period of 30 days ended.
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