‘Can’t say main bhi karoonga…’: Deepinder Goyal assures Zomato will never open restaurants

Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal has said the food delivery platform will never open its own restaurants or cloud kitchens as it will be unethical. In a conversation with celebrity chef Anahita Dhondy on his podcast ‘Breaking Bread’, Goyal said the restaurant business was hard and the food delivery platform would never enter that space.

“We don’t want to do restaurants. It’s a very hard business. We don’t want to compete with restaurants. Never. I think it’s not ethical to do it. I mean if we have built a platform working with you [restaurants] then we have sort of leveraged your presence to build this. We can’t go back and say ‘accha main bhi ye karoonga’ (I will also do it). It’s not ethical,” he told Dhondy in a candid conversation.

Even when Dhondy pressed Goyal for his opinion on what type of restaurant he would start if forced to, Goyal remained steadfast in his response. “Never. It’s been like: no chance. Honestly, if I had to, I would still not do it. I have so much respect for restaurant owners and chefs. It’s the one of the hardest businesses to run,” the Zomato founder said.

He added that a lot of people think it’s easy to run a restaurant, but they are wrong. “I think a lot of people like when they get out of college or they want to quit a job, they say ‘yaar, restaurant kholna hai mujhe’. And I am like ‘dude, that’s the hardest business ever made. So, please, don’t think about it as there’s so much more to it’,” he said.

“I would say every single business needs a certain amount of blood, sweat and tears to build. Restaurants take more blood, sweat tears to build a business. You have to be really passionate and have the energy every single day. You can’t take one day off. You take one day off, things will fall,” he added.

According to Goyal, a large percentage of the food delivery platform’s users believe Zomato runs the restaurants.

“One of our largest negative reviews is: ‘I didn’t like the quality of food’. I think maybe 30-40% of the customers out there don’t really know that we don’t make the food. They think all the restaurants are Zomato restaurants,” Goyal said.

Earlier, in an exclusive interview with Business Today magazine, Goyal had said that its quick delivery platform Blinkit could become bigger than the parent company in future.

“At that time [when it was acquired], it was a culmination [of] everything that we learnt about customer first… Albi [Albinder Dhindsa, Founder & CEO of Blinkit] and I had the right amount of trust. Blinkit will be larger than Zomato in one-tenth the time. The scale it brings to the table is huge. We don’t really think [about the] portfolio. Blinkit was about wanting something quickly,” he had told Business Today.