Jubilant FoodWorks gearing up to launch Domino's for ONDC debut

Companies like McDonald's, Biryani Blues, and Wow! Momo, among others, have already joined or are in the process of doing so on ONDC, according to industry sources.

Fast-food chain Jubilant FoodWorks is preparing to launch Domino’s Pizza on the government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform, according to a report on The Financial Express.

“We are organising ourselves to launch Domino’s on ONDC. Wherever customers are, we want to serve them with Domino’s Pizza,” Sameer Batra, president and chief business officer at Jubilant FoodWorks, said. Batra further said that the company was working on tech integration ahead of its debut on ONDC. However, he did not specify a timeline for the launch.

According to the experts, the dining industry has been ready to join the ONDC bandwagon, which has challenged the dominance of food delivery partners such as Swiggy and Zomato. Companies like McDonald’s, Biryani Blues, and Wow! Momo, among others, are already on-board with ONDC.

Heavy discounts have driven ONDC’s daily orders to 25,000 per week, which retail experts say is a short-term strategy. “On the face of it, lower prices make ONDC compelling. However, this does not seem to be based on the principle of inefficiency elimination, but on the fair amount of subsidy (up to '125 per order) that ONDC offers,'' brokerage house Jefferies recently said in its report on ONDC. Once the incentive scheme ends, either the restaurants or the customers will have to pay for delivery, Jefferies added.

ONDC will have to levy higher commissions from restaurants, resulting in higher listing prices and impacting order volumes, if they decide to absorb the majority of delivery costs, Jefferies said.

ONDC also does not have a substantial delivery fleet like Swiggy and Zomato. Instead, it has to depend on third-party delivery platforms like Shadowfax for deliveries, which removes the costs of organising and maintaining a fleet, it said.

Jubilant FoodWorks has an advantage in this case because it manages its own deliveries — even for orders that are placed on food delivery apps — with a promised timeline of 30 minutes, said experts.

Jubilant FoodWorks has started trial runs of its 20-minute pizza deliveries in Bengaluru, with plans to gradually extend this quick service to 6-7 of the other metro cities, including Delhi and Mumbai.