On 29 August, online food aggregators Zomato and Swiggy held a meeting with the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) representatives. As per a report, the NRAI representatives had earlier written to top executives at UberEats, Swiggy, Zomato and FoodPanda, highlighting eight broad issues and urging them to stop predatory practices with immediate effect.
In response, top executives from Swiggy and Zomato met with executives from NRAI and discussed the major concerns raised by restaurants such as deep discounts, uneven commission charges, private labels run by aggregators, forced fleet services and uneven terms and conditions that food aggregators use for restaurants on their platforms claiming that they are not standardized for all eateries. During the meeting, both Swiggy and Zomato agreed on various issues faced by restaurants. According to reports, they agreed to make certain changes to their commissions for eateries and standardize some of the terms and conditions for on-boarding restaurants to bring more uniformity to their platform.
A Swiggy spokesperson told media that both the parties are committed to creating value for both restaurants and consumers sustainably. They agreed to reconvene on all the points that were discussed in the meeting. Moreover, Zomato and Swiggy agreed to the point that deep discounting cannot go on; it can be episodic.
Among other issues, commission charges were discussed after restaurants complained that they were erratic and not uniform across restaurants. While discussing commission charges, both the food aggregators agreed on two things— there needs to be a logical, scientific matrix to decide what should be the percentage and secondly there has to be a maximum cap up till where commissions can go on, which cannot change till it is discussed at length, a source mentioned.
However, a financial newspaper reported that Swiggy may cap commission it charges restaurants at 25% and this decision will benefit small business owners who do not have the leverage to seal better deals due to inability to process a larger volume of orders. However, a Swiggy spokesperson claimed the 25% cap news to be purely speculative and informed that NRAI has asked Swiggy to come back with a revised proposal in 14 days.
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Naresh Khanna – 10 February 2025
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