India’s leading food delivery service, Zomato, registered a record breaking 600,000 orders on the day of the final and achieved the mark of 13 million monthly orders, during the World Cup season.
The Football World Cup has many followers in India as well, despite it being a cricketing nation. Zomato caims that during the final, by the time the match between France and Croatia went into halftime, Zomato was already registering roughly 125 orders per second.
“Yesterday was a great day for sports enthusiasts between the Wimbledon finals and the FIFA World Cup. The overall growth trends have been fantastic. While the top cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad are growing really fast, growth in tier-II and tier-III cities has also been really encouraging for us.” said Mohit Gupta, CEO - Food Delivery, Zomato.
While Delhi saw the highest number of orders at over 100,000 on the night of the finale, it was closely followed by Mumbai and Bangalore. Interestingly, even tier-II and tier-III cities, many of whom recently joined the online ordering brigade, showed a remarkable boost in the daily figures, claims the company.
In terms of the items ordered, Zomato’s data team says that chicken wings were ordered three times more than on any usual Sunday evening. While biryani and pizza were the most ordered items, biryani was ordered almost twice as much as its Italian rival.
Zomato launched its online ordering and food delivery services in May 2015 and the food delivery service is currently available across 21 cities in India, i.e. Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Kochi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Indore, Coimbatore, Vadodara, Nagpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Surat, Vizag, Bhopal, and Bhubaneswar. The company claims to be currently resgistering a monthly order run-rate of 13 million as compared to 5.5 million in March 2018, which is a growth of 2.5X growth in less than 4 months. Last year, it made an undisclosed investment into home-cooked meals startup TinMen, based out of Hyderabad’s T-Hub. This was part of Zomato’s plans of moving towards hygienic food, for which it is exploring alliance with existing players to offer a larger variety of healthy meal options to users.
Zomato also recently launched Zomato Piggybank, a reward points program for its online ordering users, who will earn 10% of the order value in their piggy bank and Zomato will donate Rs 1 per order to an NGO on their behalf on every completed order. It also recently launched Zomato Gold, which has garnered over 400,000 subscribers within a few months of launch.
Globally, Zomato is present in 24 countries and serves more than 50 million users every month. Every month, over 19 million users in India use Zomato to search and discover restaurants.