After facing widespread criticism on social media over its plan to deliver food in 10 minutes, Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal took to Twitter on Tuesday to assure users on driver safety, quality of food and the viability of the model.
In a series of tweets, Goyal assured stakeholders that the 10-minute food delivery will only happen for select food items and specific customer locations. He said Zomato is hopeful of delivering food to customers in 3-6 minutes with the delivery partners riding at 20 km per hour. Goyal claimed that the 10-minute delivery is as safe for its delivery partners as a 30-minute delivery.  

• Hello Twitter, good morning. I just want to tell you more about how 10-minute delivery works, and how it is as safe for our delivery partners as 30-minute delivery. This time, please take 2 minutes to read through this (before the outrage),” Goyal tweeted.

He said Zomato would not penalise delivery workers for late deliveries and not give any incentives for on-time deliveries. In fact, the delivery partners will not be informed about the promised delivery time, he added.

• No penalties for late deliveries. No incentives for on-time deliveries for both 10-and-30-minute deliveries,” Goyal said. “We are building new food stations to enable 10-minute service for specific customer locations only,” he added.

“We continue to educate our delivery partners on road safety and provide road accidental/life insurance as well,” he said, adding that Zomato Instant will only have items that are popular, standardised, and can therefore be dispatched within two minutes.

Responding to some queries on social media, Goyal said: “Yes, we will also serve you Maggi through our 10-minute food stations.” On the question about what items could customers expect in 10 minutes, he replied, “Bread, omelette, poha, coffee, chai, biryani, momos, etc.”

Goyal said the fulfilment of quick delivery promise relies on a dense finishing stations’ network, which is located in close proximity to high-demand customer neighbourhoods. Sophisticated dish-level demand prediction algorithms, and future-ready in-station robotics are employed to ensure that food is sterile, fresh and hot at the time it is picked by the delivery partner.
Goyal had announced that after becoming a frequent customer of Blinkit (one of Zomato’s investments in the quick commerce space), he started feeling that the 30-minute average delivery time by Zomato is too slow, and will soon have to become obsolete.

• If we don’t make it obsolete, someone else will. Innovating and leading from the front is the only way to survive (and therefore thrive) in the tech industry. And here we are… with our 10-minute food delivery offering – Zomato Instant,” he had said a day earlier.

Pointing out that nobody in the world has so far delivered hot and fresh food in under 10 minutes at scale, he said he is eager to be the first to create this category, globally. Each of the platform’s  finishing stations will house bestseller items (20-30 dishes) from various restaurants based on demand predictability and hyperlocal preferences.

• Luckily, the experience of having delivered 1.35 billion orders across India over the years makes our job a little easier,” he added.