Four months ago, food delivery giant Zomato decided to run an experiment. If you are a regular patron of the app, you may have noticed a tab called ‘Quick’ appear, that promised 15-minute deliveries in a bunch of metropolitan cities like Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi NCR. 

Now, the company’s founder and CEO made an interesting statement last year that explains why it would choose to try out this experiment. He was asked a question about how quick commerce has changed customer expectations around food delivery. And he said, quite simply – “Blinkit is fast, but that has made Zomato seem slow.” 

He has a point. You may recall that Zomato subsidiary Blinkit launched its in-house 10-minute snack delivery service called Bistro last year, just one day after the very popular Zepto cafe was launched. Swiggy Instamart meanwhile, launched a similar service called Snacc. 

In many ways, 2024 was the year 10-minute food delivery became the next frontier of quick commerce.

Naturally, the biggest food delivery giants in the country did not want to be left behind. So while Zomato launched Quick, Swiggy rolled out its own ultra-fast delivery service, Bolt. 

But here’s where things get interesting. While announcing its Q4 results last week, Zomato announced that its four-month experiment was very quickly coming to an end. In a letter to shareholders, Deepinder Goyal explained that they just could not see a path to profitability without compromising on customer experience.

The Ken’s COO and the host of Two by Two Praveen Gopal Krishnan explains what changed. 

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.