We belong to, and are very passionate about the restaurant industry; and firmly believe that restaurants should be safe social places where people go to enjoy each other’s company, eat great food and build communities. All adding to a happy and fulfilling life. People should not be worried about their safety (existential or otherwise) while visiting restaurants. Restaurants should be everybody’s happy places.

We are deeply saddened by the enormous loss of lives due to the fire incident at Kamla Mills (Mumbai) late December last year, and other similar incidents. And we know that everybody in the restaurant industry ecosystem shares the sense of loss. This was also a deeply introspective moment for us here at Zomato.

This incident made us take a step back and think that at some point of time in the past, we could have done something to reduce the probability of such an incident; and that realization pains us immensely. Looking forward, we are committing to using the power of Zomato as a discovery platform to bring in a systemic change in the entire industry so that people eat and live better.

We understand the problem is complex with multiple parties involved, but we are starting with doing our part right away – effective immediately, we are prioritizing safety related initiatives within Zomato. You may have heard about our food safety initiative before and that’s coming along nicely.

We are now also working with restaurants to put up fire safety license scans on Zomato.

Currently, only a handful of restaurants have this information available on Zomato. We are actively reaching out to more businesses to furnish their fire safety licenses. Restaurant owners, if you want to get your fire safety license displayed on Zomato, please email it to firesafety@zomato.com; for restaurants which fail to furnish their fire safety certificates, we are going to put a “Denied” symbol on their pages, so that our users know that that restaurant failed to share their fire safety certificate with us.

Now, putting up fire safety license scans on Zomato is just a small start – most restaurants in India ‘technically’ need a fire license to start operating, and I am sure we will be able to get and display fire licenses for most places. The problem is deeper and systemic in nature (e.g. fake licenses) with so many other involved parties, and the answers are going to be complex. We don’t have all the answers right now. But the important thing is that we are committed to finding systemic solutions to these issues so that we lower the probability of any type of safety incidents in restaurants.

Eventually, our goal is to make comprehensive safety information easily accessible on the platform, so our user community can make informed choices. We believe this will help raise safety standards across the industry and make attention to safety a differentiator for our restaurant partners.