Zomato, one of India’s biggest food tech companies, has quietly pulled the plug on its 15-minute food delivery feature, Zomato Quick, just four months after launch. Once displayed prominently on the app’s homepage, the feature has vanished from major cities including Bengaluru, Gurugram, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. It’s a surprising move – or maybe not – depending on how you look at it.
Alongside Quick, Zomato has also shut down Zomato Everyday, a service that promised homestyle meals to office-goers. In a candid letter to shareholders, founder Deepinder Goyal explained the decision: “We are shutting down both these initiatives as we are not seeing the path to profitability in these without compromising on customer experience.”
The core issue? India’s restaurant ecosystem, as it stands today, isn’t built for ultra-quick fulfillment. Delivering meals in under 10–15 minutes might work for a packet of chips or a chocolate bar, but a fresh, hot, satisfying meal? That’s still a tough logistical challenge.
Goyal elaborated that Quick failed to generate meaningful demand despite initial curiosity. “The current restaurant density & kitchen infrastructure is not set up for delivering orders in 10 minutes,” he wrote. “As a result, we did not see any incrementality in demand while we ran Quick as an experiment.”
It’s a familiar pattern. This was Zomato’s second major push into hyper-fast food delivery, following Zomato Instant in 2022, which also folded quietly within months. Everyday, which offered affordable, comfort-style meals, seemed promising but found a narrow audience, mostly among metro-based office workers – too small a group to sustain operations at scale.
Interestingly, Zomato isn’t giving up on quick meals altogether – it’s just reframing the game. Instead of offering 15-minute delivery within the main app, it’s channeling those ambitions into Bistro by Blinkit. This new effort taps into Blinkit’s robust network of dark stores – mini-warehouses built for speed – to serve up ready-to-eat snacks, small meals, and bakery items. Think sandwiches, wraps, and croissants, not biryanis and butter chicken.
The shift hints at a larger strategy: keep full-fledged restaurant orders and rapid-fire snack cravings separate. With Blinkit already a leader in quick-commerce, leveraging its muscle for light food makes sense.
Meanwhile, Zomato’s decision also reflects a broader industry reality. Competitors like Zepto Café, which pioneered the 10-minute snack delivery model, now see over 100,000 daily orders – but they’ve done it through dedicated, focused infrastructure, not by squeezing it into a multi-purpose food delivery app.
Ultimately, Zomato’s latest pivot is a reminder that speed is seductive – but scalability, consistency, and customer satisfaction still win the long game. As the company recalibrates, it may just be setting the stage for a smarter, more sustainable quick food play. Not in 15 minutes – but maybe, in due time.
