Zomato is testing a new way to make food delivery even faster: putting the food inside the workplace itself.
The food-delivery platform is piloting food vending machines at select corporate offices in Gurugram, according to The Economic Times. The initiative is being tested in partnership with food and restaurant brands and is aimed at giving employees quicker access to meals without waiting for a delivery partner to travel from a restaurant to the office.
The experiment, reportedly being referred to as ‘Zomato Now’, marks another attempt by the company to rethink the last-mile delivery model as convenience and speed become increasingly important in India’s food-tech market.
Traditional food delivery involves multiple steps: a customer places an order, a restaurant prepares it, a delivery partner picks it up and then travels to the customer’s location.
Zomato’s workplace vending-machine model removes a significant part of that journey.
By placing prepared food within corporate offices, the platform can potentially bring meals much closer to the customer before an order is even placed. Employees could then access available food directly from the machine, reducing the distance and time involved in conventional delivery.
The pilot is currently focused on Gurugram corporate workplaces, with the company testing the model quietly before determining whether it can be expanded.
Corporate offices offer a particularly relevant environment for the experiment.
Large workplaces have concentrated demand, with hundreds or thousands of employees occupying the same location. Instead of making multiple individual deliveries to different addresses, a vending machine can potentially serve a large number of customers from a single location.
That could make the economics of ultra-fast food access different from conventional delivery.
