“The world is not in your books and maps, it’s out there.” – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

If records are meant to be broken, what about the milestones? Particularly when we are running a marathon. A few weeks ago, we crossed the 200-city barrier for our food delivery business in India.

And today, we have crossed the 300 city milestone – meaning 300+ cities in India can now order online on Zomato – and are currently operating in varied places like Bhuj and Junagadh in Gujarat, Rishikesh and Mussoorie in Uttarakhand, Shimla in Himachal Pradesh, Hosur and Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu, Ayodhya and Raebareli in Uttar Pradesh, Chikmagalur and Bhatkal in Karnataka, Kharagpur in West Bengal, Chhapra and Begusarai in Bihar, Hazaribagh and Ramgarh in Jharkhand, Jalna and Parbhani in Maharashtra, and so on.

It is important to pause and understand the import of this milestone. There are 40 cities in India with a population of over a million and over 380 cities in India with a population of over 100,000. When you fundamentally move beyond the 40 cities to the 380, you are truly representing India. And this is central to our mission of better food for more people, to scale our service to every corner of India.

Prior to this phase, our food delivery services were present in only two cities (Guwahati and Nagaon) in one northeastern state – Assam. And now, we have launched three more cities (Silchar and Dibrugarh in Assam and Agartala in Tripura) – bringing the total to five cities in two NE states. This is a small yet committed step to our future presence in the Seven Sister States.  

While expanding, we take three main factors into consideration –

• Population – the chosen city/town has to have over a lakh inhabitants so that our intended operation can be carried out efficiently as well as effectively
• Students as a demographic – even if the chosen city is tiny in area, having a considerable percentage of student presence encourages us to pilot our services there; 10 years from now, we think that these students are going to be our biggest and most influential brand ambassadors, and we want to grow up with them and be an important part of their journey
• Supply – are there enough restaurants who can bear the operational brunt of an instant uptick in demand from spikes in food delivery occasions – weekends, late-night, extreme weather

In the recently concluded phase of city launches, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh have ticked all the three boxes above and proved to be the most active, with the highest number of launches.

Yes, these are exciting times as we continue to build deeper in existing cities and test unchartered territories across the country. We are onboarding 45-50 restaurants in each city on average; a figure that’s bound to move northward over the coming weeks.

The most endearing and humbling aspect of this expansion has been the inclusion of delivery partners from the smaller cities/towns who wish to make food deliveries on their bicycles. Instead of insisting on motorcycles, we are encouraging them to go ahead with their bicycles as we continue to work on introducing e-cycles in the upcoming fleet. And that has happened along with us continuing to improve our average delivery times, which now stand at 30.5 minutes.

Each new city is a new mini-chapter for me. And I’m intensely proud that our teams have stood up to any and every challenge, whether operational or logistical, that diverse India has thrown at them.

We are sprinting forward to let the real India have a taste of Zomato and for Zomato to deliver to more of India. And so far, Indians are loving what we have to serve.