Food delivery recovery: Swiggy sees order value back to 85% of pre-Covid level; supports 5k restaurants

Foodtech company Swiggy is gradually nearing its pre-Covid business. After orders dipping to negligible levels post February-March and during the lockdown period, Swiggy on Thursday said that its pan India food delivery has recovered to around 80-85 per cent of pre-Covid order value while in “many markets” it has returned to 95 per cent, and “some even over 100%.” Recovery for the overall food delivery market, according to a Zomato analysis up till September, clocked around more than 85 per cent of pre-Covid gross merchandise value up from around over 75 per cent in August.

“Big food delivery markets such as Bangalore, Chennai are seeing very fast recovery, however, due to a lot of the customer migration from these metros into Tier-II, III+ cities, they have reached their 80+ per cent GMV levels,” Swiggy said. Moreover, on the restaurant end, Swiggy claimed adding over 7,000 new restaurants per month on its platform, around 3,000 more than pre-Covid. Out of these 7,000 units, 6,000 restaurants are small and medium outlets vis-à-vis 3,500 before Covid. The company added that it supported more than 50,000 restaurants in a four-month period under its Jumpstart Package to help them recover from the pandemic. The support included establishing safety and hygiene protocols, sharing training content on safety best practices, providing access to safety grade packaging material and kits, etc.

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Meanwhile, the Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) had recently written to Swiggy along with Zomato for reducing commission charges on takeaway services. The letter, which was reviewed by Financial Express, sent to Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal and Swiggy’s Sriharsha Majety sought to bring down the commission charges by 5 per cent with retrospective effect from May 2020. The charges, as of now, vary between 18-40 per cent of the order value. “Due to the surging numbers of infections all over the country, the recovery process is going to be a long drawn out affair for the sector,” the letter read. Earlier this month, both Swiggy and Zomato had reportedly received notices from Google that stated their in-app gamification features violated Play Store’s policies, days after the Paytm app was removed temporarily from the store by Google for violating its gambling policies.