The food@work programme started as a pre-covid offering to provide home-like meals. While those at Zomato Headquarters (Gurugram, Haryana) would have tasted hot, freshly prepared meals at the food@work station, its journey was short-lived. As the ‘office’ became a work-from-home setup during the pandemic, the food@work program had to shut its doors.

The doors might have shut, but innovation always finds a way. 

The food@work team took it upon themselves to pivot and scale their offering to suit and survive in the new reality. And over the course of two weeks, chiselled the idea to start the ‘corporate meal program’. 

The vision was simple – companies could provide a great experience to their employees by offering them food at their convenient times and location. Well, it may have been simple, but it was not easy. We started with grasping a better understanding of the logistics and on-ground execution. Naturally, we needed answers to hundreds of questions –  how will we identify companies? How would we coordinate the requests? How will we track the individual requests? How will we provide the coupons and avoid duplication?

Our belief in the vision and the team’s effort stayed put. So we took the challenge head-on and commenced the corporate meal program with a one-time event for a small organisation in Gurugram, wherein we delivered ~70 meals in August 2020.

The building blocks of Zomato for Work

And just like that, Zomato for Work took shape and flight. The initiative enables companies to engage with employees working from different locations – home or office. And when it comes to engagement, what’s better than food? Through this initiative, we help employees of different companies with their favourite food at their doorstep. In other words, company lunches are delivered to everyone at their homes. 

In September 2020, we announced Corporate Vouchers and proposed them to many organisations. It turned out to be a significant inflection point. At that time, with our presence in 700+ cities, organisations could think of organising a daily meal/ virtual team lunch for employees spread across the country. We tested this with different companies and got our fair share of successful and failed case studies. It also gave us enough time to refine our offering, and by the end of the year, we realised it had the potential to disrupt. 

The journey from Zero to One

While it took us a week to onboard our first partner, by the end of the six months, we had already onboarded 100+ corporate clients. At this rate, we were serving various tech companies with employees ranging anywhere between 250 to 7,000. And behind all these big numbers was a small team of five trailblazers.

Our first significant partnership came from a tech giant – a request to serve more than 1,50,000 meals in 400+ cities. With great responsibility came greater challenges. Our team members spent many all-nighters to ensure every employee enjoyed their meal. Our dedication knew no (geographical) limits. For example, we even covered a distance of 30 km for one delivery.

To elevating customer (meal) experiences 

Now, with our foot in the door and orders pouring in, we shifted our focus to making each meal experience memorable. We talked to a few partners and launched customised vouchers from chain-based restaurants. Next, we launched Recurring meals – daily/ weekly/ monthly – based on different corporate needs. We also expanded to help corporates celebrate important events like festivals, company town halls or annual summits.

Pivot to evolve, pivot to better problem-solve

We continue to evolve as we move ahead in our journey and solve a unique problem for each onboarded client, keen on engaging their employees better.

Today, Zomato for Work provides vouchers which can be tailor-made as per corporate requirements –

• Daily vs One-time meals – can be either recurring meals or event-based (town hall, teammate’s birthday)
• Date-specific – can only be used on a designated date 
• Location-specific – can only be used in a designated city/ area
• Restaurant-specific – allows corporates to place orders from specific chain-based restaurants

Hitting our local maxima

In February 2022, we hit our local maxima when our clientele reached 350+, and the monthly meal count was at a whopping 1,80,000+. By this time, we also had city-wise sales teams in all major metropolitans like Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, etc. And we were already itching to ask the pertinent question – what next?

So, what next?

Going all in with our one-stop solution experience, we are constantly adding new products and features to our corporate offerings. The next in line is adding Edition card benefits and geo-based vouchers.   

This is a Behind The Scenes (BTS at Zomato) article to share insights on building and developing a new business at Zomato. If you are interested in knowing more about gifting Zomato Vouchers and other employee engagement plans, visit our site here – www.zomato.com/enterprise-solutions.

This blog was written by Udit Chawla in collaboration with the Zomato for Work team.

_{All images are designed in-house.}