Earlier, On 9 January 2025, Sagar Daryani stated that the industry body was considering the option of taking a legal route
As the entry of online food delivery players into quick commerce space to deliver food within 10 minutes through standalone apps sparked outrage from the industry bodies, the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) is now considering taking the legal route and approaching the courts to seek intervention on standalone 10-minute food delivery apps, as per the media reports.
The association is conducting a restaurant industry townhall on Wednesday to discuss the impact of food aggregators on the restaurant business. The senior officials of the industry including the President of the NRAI, Sagar Daryani will likely be discussing the next steps in the session.
The media reports state that the industry officials have been engaging with Zomato and Swiggy to discuss the issues. However, the meetings have so far failed to yield an outcome as the report stated that food aggregators tried to allay the issues which were raised.
On 9 January 2025, Daryani stated that the industry body was considering the option of taking a legal route. “We are definitely considering taking a serious legal route. As long as these aggregators are okay working with restaurants and enable restaurants to go quick, we are absolutely fine with it but we will not want to be demolished as an industry where they end up selling our similar products. This has not been allowed for even larger Ecommerce players operating in the marketplace,” he stated.
To give context, the NRAI earlier stated that as marketplace platforms, Zomato and Swiggy were built on the premise of providing equal opportunities for all restaurant partners. However, the body accused that their entry into delivering food through private labelling and selling on their platforms and also delivering private labelled food via their own quick commerce platforms such as Blinkit Bistro and Swiggy Café / Snacc fundamentally violated this neutrality and created an uneven playing field.
Meanwhile, media reports added that Deepinder Goyal, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Zomato has written a letter to the restaurant partners of the company to address issues revolving the same matter.
