Zomato cracks whip on restaurants without FSSAI licence, delists several

Online restaurant discovery and food delivery portal Zomato has started de-listing restaurants that are not compliant with the regulations set by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) from its platform. The company has about 55,000 restaurants on its online ordering platform.

Once the delisted restaurants provide their FSSAI licences, they will be re-listed on Zomato's food delivery platform. “As and when these restaurants provide us their FSSAI licenses, we will enable them for online ordering services,” said Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato, in a blog post on Tuesday.

Those with high Zomato ratings or high repeat order volumes have been given until month-end to furnish their licences.

“Most of our high order volume restaurant partners currently have or have applied for their FSSAI licences. We are certain this move will not have an impact on our order volumes, said Mohit Gupta, CEO - Food Delivery Business, Zomato.

Zomato will also run mandatory hygiene checks, following the food safety and hygiene checklist, before listing any cloud kitchen on its platform. These hygiene checks are conducted by accredited third party auditors.

The FSSAI had in July directed food delivery start-ups including Zomato, Swiggy, and UberEats to delist those restaurants from their platform that did not have licence issued by the regulator following several complaints on poor quality food being delivered by such platforms. The regulator had also stated in August that that about 30-40 per cent of listed food businesses by e-commerce aggregators are unlicenced or unregistered. In many cases, listed food businesses have recently applied for FSSAI licence/registration but still do not possess them.