Zomato Launches Food Rescue Feature To Minimise Wastage: Here's How It Works

Online food delivery platform Zomato on Sunday introduced a new feature to cut down on food wastage. The feature, called Food Rescue, will offer cancelled orders at "unbeatable prices" to nearby customers within a 3-kilometre radius of the delivery partner, providing a solution in case a customer cancels their order. Announcing the move through a post on X, Zomato’s founder and chief executive officer Deepinder Goyal, wrote, “We don't encourage order cancellation at Zomato, because it leads to a tremendous amount of food wastage. In spite of stringent policies, and a no-refund policy for cancellations, more than 4 lakh perfectly good orders get cancelled on Zomato, for various reasons by customers.”

The top concern for the restaurant industry was to somehow save the food from being wasted, he said.

“Today, we are introducing a new feature (being scaled as we speak) – Food Rescue! Cancelled orders will now pop up for nearby customers, who can grab them at an unbeatable price, in their original untampered packaging, and receive them in just minutes,” Goyal said.

Zomato's Food Rescue feature will allow customers within a 3 km radius of the delivery partner to purchase cancelled orders at discounted prices. The claim option will pop up only for a few minutes to ensure freshness. However, the original customers and those within direct vicinity of them will not receive the option to claim.

“The amount paid by the new customer will be shared with the original customer (if they made an online payment), and with the restaurant partner. Zomato will not keep any proceeds (except the required government taxes),” Zomato said in a blog.

Customers who prefer vegetarian food will not see non-veg orders up for claim.

Orders having food sensitive to temperature or distance will not be eligible for Food Rescue. This includes ice creams, shakes, smoothies, and certain perishable items.

“Food Rescue will show up on your home page automatically if there's a cancelled order available for you to grab. Refresh the home page to check for any newly available orders which need to be rescued,” Goyal said in his post on X.

“We are heartened to see that 99.9% of our restaurant partners want to be a part of this initiative,” said the Zomato blog.

The company said that restaurant partners would receive compensation for the cancelled item. Further, the restaurant will also receive a portion of the amount paid by the new customer.

Restaurants can opt out of the Food Rescue option at any time if they do not wish to participate in the programme.

Zomato said that delivery partners will get full compensation for the entire trip, from the pickup at the restaurant to the drop-off at the location of the new customer.