Zomato will not compete with restaurant partners: CEO Deepinder Goyal

Bistro, company's instant food delivery app, is not a private label, he says in email

Zomato’s instant food delivery app Bistro is not a “private label” and will not compete with restaurants, said Deepinder Goyal, the startup’s founder and chief executive officer, seeking to reassure industry associations and food aggregators.

 

Bistro is a separate app and its menus are curated using publicly available information, he said in an email to Zomato’s restaurant partners. “The Bistro team has no access to data that would create an unfair playing field. In fact, all Zomato data and insights are available to all restaurant partners and the public through Zomato Trends,” he said. ‘Business Standard’ has seen a copy of the email.

 

“In the past, I have expressed that Zomato as a restaurant-aggregator will never compete with its own restaurant partners, unlike players such as Amazon who sell their own private labels on Amazon. Zomato has fully backed this commitment by never opening a physical restaurant and will NOT use Zomato as a distribution channel for kitchens that we do.”

 

Restaurants have contacted Zomato to share their concerns about Bistro, which was launched in December 2024. In his response, Goyal said the app doesn’t pose an “existential threat” to restaurants.

 

“Even at 1,000 outlets, Bistro would barely be 0.5 per cent of the market. Also, scaling Bistro isn’t the goal of this experiment - it is to find a workable business model that the restaurant industry can replicate. India's out-of-home food consumption has room to expand, and new service models like Bistro will help acquire new customers, benefiting the wider restaurant ecosystem,” he said.

 

The National Restaurants Association of India and the Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India have expressed their concerns about the app. They have said that the industry is under pressure due to deep discounting, high commissions, consumer data masking, and breach of trust by food aggregators.