'Zomato To Serve 20 Crore Customers in Next Few Years'

Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said the online food delivery platform aims to serve 20 crore people in India over the next few years who will order food at least five times a month.

Admitting that his thoughts may be "labelled as stupid for saying out loud," Goyal said that out of the 20 crore future Zomato users, nearly 2 crore will order food once a day, 24X7.

"These 20 crore people (and in some time, many more than that) are the real India. And that India is coming of age. Domestic consumption in India is what it is - and it is going to grow as it is," Goyal said in a blog post.

Zomato is delivering 1.3 million orders a day from 150,000 restaurants across India at more than 10 orders per restaurant per day.

Stressing upon Cloud kitchens, Goyal said the food aggregator platform is committed to develop cloud kitchens to bridge the supply gap.

"I want to re-emphasise that we will never compete with our restaurateur partners - we will only build the kitchens - but they will be operated by restaurant brands," said Goyal.

Zomato's kitchens are operational in 50 cities across India, with 110 kitchen hubs (either completed or under construction). In total, there are 663 kitchen units and kiosks.

Zomato's revenue for the first half of the financial year 2019-20 saw a massive three-fold jump - from $63 million in the same period in 2018-2019 to $205 million.

The Zomato CEO also touched upon how the company is helping users understand what food delivery means and how they can use the Zomato app for their family in over 400 cities in India.

Zomato is currently present in 556 cities.

Trivandrum was Zomato's 50th city in November 2018 and Leh was the 500th in July this year.

Zomato is also uninterruptedly active in 10 cities (Guwahati, Nagaon, Jorhat, Agartala, Silchar, Dibrugarh, Tezpur, Shillong, Tinsukia and Aizawl) in the North East region.

"Tier 3 and 4 cities now contribute 35 per cent of the monthly order volume. These cities are relatively small but are growing at a frenetic pace," said Goyal.

Out of the total delivery partner network in non-metro cities, 20 per cent are on bicycles.