At Zomato, we care about our users as much as we care about our restaurant partners. Without a balance between these two elements, we wouldn’t be able to adhere to our long-held mission – better food for more people. However, it hurts us when regulations and hygiene standards are not followed by restaurants.

As a result, starting  today, we are de-listing hundreds of restaurants from our food ordering platform for not being compliant to Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) regulations. These restaurants were not able to furnish an FSSAI license to Zomato. As you must know by now, we take hygiene very seriously; so much so we introduced Food Hygiene Ratings last year; an initiative that is being embraced by the restaurant community. For us, it’s a matter of taking the right call because at the end of the day, the wellbeing of our users matter immensely to us. As and when these restaurants provide us their FSSAI licenses, we will enable them for online ordering services.

Some restaurants who were not able to furnish their FSSAI licenses have high Zomato ratings and/or high repeat order volumes on Zomato – we have given them until the end of this month to furnish their licenses to us.

The de-listing of restaurants happened thanks to our collaborative effort  with FSSAI. Along with FSSAI, Zomato is a guardian of users and the restaurant industry. As a result, FSSAI and Zomato have worked together to take strict actions in the interest of public health. In fact, we are going to make sure that we don’t list any cloud kitchen on Zomato unless and until it goes through our mandatory hygiene check, which is a food safety and hygiene checklist. This hygiene check is conducted by reputed third parties who are experts at this.

These measures will certainly help strengthen the ecosystem as it will filter out parties that aren’t keen on prioritizing the users’ interest. Nobody wants to consume food prepared in an unkempt kitchen. Following this de-listing drive, we are expecting an uptick in hygiene standards.

I personally wish to thank the FSSAI CEO, Pawan Kumar Agarwal, and fully support his organization’s ongoing efforts toward a safer and better restaurant industry in India.

Lastly, Zomato is designed to be a democratic quality controller in the industry. Which means that users are (obviously) welcome to help us in this endeavour. As a user, if you feel that the quality or hygiene of any restaurant/meal you had was subpar, you can/must write a constructive review on Zomato. All of us are well aware that everybody checks a restaurant’s Zomato rating before going to a new place or ordering in food. Unbeknownst to you, your review goes a long way in making sure that only the best restaurant businesses are able to succeed.