After touching 21M monthly orders, Zomato launches pickup option

Zomato Pickup will let users order food on the app and pick it up at their convenience; the service is currently available in 13 cities.

Deepinder Goyal, Co-founder and CEO, Zomato, on Wednesday announced on the company blog that they had launched Zomato Pickup, a new product feature. This feature lets users order food on the app and choose to pick it up whenever they want. The blog stated: “Now, you can get food as quick as 15 minutes while enjoying exclusive offers from restaurants.”

Deepinder explained that the feature combined the ease of ordering through the app, and also provided the user the flexibility of grabbing the meal whenever s/he wanted. Once the user chooses to place an order on the Zomato App, s/he can select the Pickup Your Order option. After this, s/he can pick a restaurant, place the order, and then go to pick up the food.

Zomato Pickup offers all the benefits that one gets while ordering food online, be it piggyback coins or restaurant offers. The feature is currently available in 13 cities, and the team is working to add more cities to the list.

Deepinder added: “Also, we have around 20,000 restaurants where you can place your pickup orders from – out of which 18,000 are committed to offering this service exclusively with us.”

Late last week, Zomato also announced that they had hit 21 million monthly orders and had an online food delivery presence across 41 cities. Deepinder wrote: “This past Sunday, we crossed over a million orders — our greatest delivery milestone so far.”

Zomato joined the online food delivery market when Swiggy had already established its presence. Since then, the Delhi-based food delivery platform has been giving the Bengaluru unicorn a run for its money. Last month, Zomato announced its entry in the B2B foodtech space by acquiring TongueStun, a Bengaluru-based online caterer and office canteen aggregator.

Reports suggest the cash-and-stock deal was valued at $18 million. Zomato had last year acquired Runnr, the Bengaluru-based hyperlocal delivery platform, to up its delivery game and compete with Swiggy. The company has made over 12 acquisitions so far and most of the acquisitions were made in 2015 across different geographies.

It is interesting to see that both foodtech unicorns, Swiggy and Zomato, are in an aggressive growth battle. Swiggy has acquired 48East and Mumbai-based Scootsy, and has also launched Swiggy Access, Capital Assist, and Packaging Assist.