The culinary industry with the advent of internet, has paved its way into the burgeoning online market. Technology has kicked in with multitude of applications that provide food delivery within minutes coupled with superior customer service and quality standards. The food apps have captured the market completely and lures the customers with different types of attractive discounts. It has brought the food ordering under a single window where one has option to choose from the best restaurants of one’s neighbourhood’s as well as the distant ones.
Now, your favourite dish is just a click away. One can get food delivered on time without any hassle. To satisfy one’s hunger pangs, there are many food apps available in the market. Most famous food apps being Zomato, Foodpanda, Swiggy and Burrp. These app have managed to create a niche for them in the food sector.
They are not merely food ordering apps but also function as a quick guide around the city for the best offers and discounts. Nothing can be more flexible than finding all about a food outlet one intends to visit on Zomato. The famous food app Zomato was founded in 2008. It was initally known as Foodiebay, has been the godfather for on demand menu cards in 23 countries worldwide.
Naina Sahani Parnaik, the official spokesperson of Zomato says, “We have had a very successful launch of our food delivery business in India and the UAE over the last year. The food delivery business currently contribute to about 20% of our Indian revenues. Our mainstay is the classified business through which our consumers are able to search and discover restaurants on Zomato, and the unit economics for the food delivery business online ordering are positive which means the business is near profitable for us.”
For any business to prosper, the basic requirement is to have a strategy in place. Strategically executed plans always work when one has large business in mind, such as food apps.
Now, your favourite dish is just a click away. One can get food delivered on time without any hassle. To satisfy one’s hunger pangs, there are many food apps available on the market. Apps like Zomato, Foodpanda, Swiggy and Burrp. These have managed to create a niche for themselves in the hospitality sector.
Foodpanda is another such app which has grabbed a large share in market. RashikaYadav, communication manager of Foodpanda, says that their business strategy is really strong. She says, “India is a very challenging yet rapidly growing market and it is important to examine and stabilize operations and processes. Secondly, it is important for every company to pick up the right opportunities wherein they can grow and achieve profitability.”
“We are very excited for foodpanda’s future in India and have laid a very strong foundation for our business which has grown over 10 times since last year and will continue to rapidly grow this year as well,” she adds.
The increasing number of new restaurants in cities is helping these food apps grow further in the market. With the swarming of these apps, the food sector is now a competitive venture.
Swiggy which is a food-tech startup based out of Bengaluru and is slowly making its presence felt in about in other cities of the country too, believes in slow and steady business.
Nandan Reddy, co-founder of Swiggy, says, “Our business is very different from our competitors in terms of our business model. They have been endeavouring to build a sustainable business. There is a high emphasis on customer centricity and in line with the same. We offer some important features such as no minimum order value, live tracking, multiple payment options and the fastest delivery. We believe in owning the complete customer experience and hence have invested in a delivery fleet.”
In the same vein, Pradeep Prabhu, business head of Burrp, says, “Burrp is a local food and restaurant recommendation engine. Burrp has been making eating out more convenient since 2006. Burrp is the Indian food discovery space and quite literally introduced consumer technology in food and beverage industry. This space has evolved significantly over the last 24 months.”
Another business head of Blurrp, Abhishek Chhajlani, says that discounts hardly plays any role in attracting consumers. Like for summer discount, he says, “Most food tech players have wafer thin margins that makes discounting suicidal. We don’t believe that discounting principle as it’s a very short sighted approach.”
With the coming of these apps, not only the consumers have profited as they have larger food options now but it is clearly visible that the food app commerce has also emerged as a profitable business.