… to reduce packaging and environmental waste!

Food delivery aggregators and platforms are changing the way consumers dine. Across the world, we offer our users great convenience and greater choice in what they eat — wherever and whenever. We help them save time, effort, and money. And all this while serving our restaurant partners, providing them greater reach to more consumers, and helping thousands of small businesses scale up faster.

However, we can do more. In fact, much more.

An unintended consequence of our business is that as more people order more food, the industry will consume more plastic packaging material. Zomato alone processes 16.5 million orders a month; all the food delivery aggregators put together process around 35-40 million orders a month. These many orders add up to 22,000 metric tonnes of plastic waste created every month in India. And whether we intend it or not, quite a lot of it ends up in the ocean. Much as we care about delighting our partners and our users, we must also care about the impact we have on our planet.

At Zomato, we’ve been taking baby steps to reduce our impact on the environment. On our app, we offer consumers an opportunity to opt out of cutlery when they order, thereby reducing plastic use, and also working with our restaurant partners to increase adherence to this feature.

On Sunday, Zomato’s delivery fleet drove for 2.4 million kilometers to deliver around 600k orders – that’s six times the distance between earth and moon. It is imperative that we work with restaurants and users to “pool” delivery routes, thereby reducing fuel consumption while keeping delivery times intact.

We are also working with kitchens to help them modify serving portions based on the feedback we receive, thereby reducing overall wastage. Our delivery partners use insulated, specially designed bags that keep food fresh without additional packaging layers.

And as mentioned earlier, we ought to do more. Which is also why we need to do this together. Even as we compete with one another for greater market shares, let’s share ideas for a more effective ecosystem and ultimately, a better world.

Let’s start reducing the amount of packaging material and while we are at it, let’s improve the quality of the material we’re already using. This long-term endeavour will take time but it will certainly make a huge difference.