Zomato, Swiggy hit 2 mn orders each on New Year's Eve as India stays home

Zomato logs 6,000 orders per minute at around 7pm; Swiggy says it hit 6,600 orders per minute.

Food delivery platforms Swiggy and Zomato saw a spike in orders on New Year’s Eve (NYE) with cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai placing curbs on celebrations amid new Covid variant. Both the foodtech unicorns said around 9 pm on Friday that they had crossed 2 million orders for the day.

Zomato saw 6,000 orders per minute at around 7pm--its highest ever--on Friday and it expected the number to shoot up further and peak at 8:30 PM, according to Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal. He also tweeted that the foodtech app was seeing very high app openings by users and the number of live orders touched 165,000 just before 7 PM.

Rival Swiggy tweeted just a few minutes later that it had hit 6,600 orders per minute. “On Swiggy’s first NYE in 2014 as a 3-month-old food delivery platform, we did 1 order every 3 minutes. How times have changed,” said Swiggy Founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety. He added that he would come out of his comfort zone to share New Year’s Eve ordering updates on the microblogging platform.

Sharing order metrics for Blinkit (previously Grofers), in which Zomato invested $100 million for a stake of around 10 per cent in 2021, Goyal tweeted: “7,000 packs of nachos have been ordered already. And 43,000 cans of aerated drinks. Not going to share the stats on condoms”.

It will be a quiet New Year’s Eve at restaurants and bars due to night curfews and bans on celebrations in various states. Cafes and clubs have either canceled or scaled down their events depending on local restrictions. Delhi and Uttar Pradesh have imposed a night curfew while Chennai has banned all vehicles except emergency ones from Friday midnight to 5 am on Saturday.

A spokesperson for Swiggy said earlier it hoped to fulfill the expected surge in orders smoothly. “We have beefed up our teams as we expect a surge in orders for New Year’s. We have completed hyperlocal demand-supply planning and identified the specific slots which would see an increase in demand due to early ordering patterns. Delivery partners’ incentives and schemes are also tailored to satisfy this early ordering pattern,” said a spokesperson.

“We expect this year to be no different and are fully geared for it. We have expanded the capacity of our delivery fleet and our support and operations staff to ensure customers have a great experience on the platform on the day,” a Zomato spokesperson told 'Business Standard' on December 30.