As the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) accused Zomato and Swiggy of entering private-label food delivery through their quick-commerce platforms and even threatened to take legal action against them, Albinder Dhindsa, the CEO of Zomato’s Blinkit has opened up.
Blinkit CEO clarifies
On platform X (formerly Twitter), the CEO stated that Zomato would never launch private brands on its app to compete with its restaurant partners.
“Also, as @deepigoyal has always said, Zomato will never launch private brands on the Zomato app to compete with its restaurant partners. This still holds true,” Dhindsa wrote.
Accusations by NRAI
The restaurant body NRAI accused Zomato and Swiggy exploited data derived from restaurant partners while launching competing products creating a conflict of interest.
NRAI President and Wow Momo! CEO Sagar Daryani expressed disappointment by saying, “We were always given verbal assurances by the aggregators that they would never resort to private labelling. This is a breach of trust.”
He even remarked that the NRAI is “absolutely not okay” with this development declaring the association would seek legal remedies while approaching regulatory authorities.
However, Dhindsa pointed out that Bistro is not being built within Zomato. It would have a standalone team, with a standalone app, and Zomato restaurant data would not be used. He further assured that they would not even use the Zomato app to market Bistro.
“This is going to be a significant additional cost to us, but ethics and sticking to our word mean more than anything else to us at Zomato and we are not going to give it up to save some marketing cost,” Dhindsa shared.
“All the companies innovating with us on Bistro also work with a number of restaurants and our success at Bistro has the potential to add value for the entire food & restaurant ecosystem,” he further wrote on X.
This post came after Dhindsa announced the launch of Bistro, Blinkit’s new 10-minute food offering mentioning it as “a new app, outside of Blinkit and Zomato”. Currently, this service is live across a few locations in Gurugram. This app, he had mentioned will offer consumers ‘high quality’ canteen-type food, delivered hot in 10 minutes.
“To achieve this, we are innovating on the entire food supply chain with Bistro,” Blinkit’s Albinder Dhindsa revealed.
“At Bistro, no preservatives or food processors are used in preparing the food, nor is it microwaved processed food. Instead, we are investing in infrastructure and R&D to create tasty dishes within 5 minutes or less. We have partnered with a number of companies innovating in the food industry to make this happen and will continue to support the ecosystem,” he added.
Also read: Swiggy Launches “Pyng” App to Seize Professional Services Marketplace (startuppedia.in)
/startuppedia/media/media_files/2025/01/10/cqmh2BLy7CI428KaUrY3.jpg)