Zomato launches new feature to tackle food waste due to cancelled orders

Food delivery firm Zomato on Sunday launched a new “food rescue” feature to tackle with food waste arising out of cancelled orders.

Now, customers living near restaurants will be able to purchase cancelled food orders at “unbeatable prices”, announced the company’s CEO Deepinder Goyal. “Cancelled orders will now pop up for nearby customers, who can grab them at an unbeatable price, in their original untampered packaging, and receive them in just minutes,” wrote Goyal in a post on X.

The CEO said that customers cancel more than 4 lakh “perfectly good orders” on a daily basis for various reasons, in spite of the company’s stringent policies like zero refund for cancellations. “The top concern for us, the restaurant industry, and even the customers who cancel these orders, is to somehow save the food from going to waste,” the post added.

Goyal said the new feature is being scaled for a larger rollout across all cities.

Zomato under CCI scanner
On Saturday, a probe by regulator Competition Commission of India (CCI) found that food delivery platforms, including Zomato, indulged in unfair business practices, including alleged preferential treatment to select restaurant partners.

The probe was based on a complaint from the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI). The regulator said preferential treatment can include aspects like control over food delivery, modification a restaurant’s search ranking, etc.

In addition, the platform price parity clauses in the agreement indicate that restaurants were not allowed to maintain lower prices or offer higher discounts on any of their own supply channel or on any other aggregator, so that the minimum price or maximum discounts can be maintained by the platform alone.

In April 2022, the CCI had observed that “prima facie there exists a conflict-of-interest situation, warranting a detailed scrutiny into its impact on the overall competition between the RPs vis-à-vis the private brands/entities which the platforms may be incentivised to favour”.