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MUMBAI, India – Aakanksha Porwal, the owner of a little retro diner called Vahnilla & Co.recently registered the Zomato food delivery app make dishes like its vegetarian cheeseburgers and Kit Kat's iced cakes to a wider audience. She also joined Zomato's Gold program, where she would offer two dishes for the price of one to members who Californiame to dine in person.
The goal was to help her develop her fledgling business. But three months and 150 free dishes later, Ms. Porwal became disillusioned.
The free food cost him about 20% of his income, in addition to Zomato Gold's registration fee of about 550 dollars, she said. Gold users, who pay about $ 14 a year for 6,000 restaurants at the price of a la carte dinner, are often rude and demand additional discounts, she added. And Vahnilla pays Zomato a large commission of 28% on each order delivered.
"Zomato is the greatest thing that can happen to a customer," Ms. Porwal said. "The consideration for restaurateurs is literally nothing."
Now, in a collective cry, Indian restaurants are rebelling against Zomato and other leading restoration applications.
Two weeks ago, a group of restaurateurs near New Delhi called for an end to cuts on the very salty prices offered constantly by Zomato and competitors such as Swiggy and Uber Eats. They argued that costs are the responsibility of restaurants while applications reap the benefits. The event, which has garnered the public support of thousands of restaurants, has its own hashtag, #Logout. Many have left the Gold program or are committed to doing so.
"The consumer feels that a discount has been his right, not a privilege," said the insurgency leader, Rahul Singh, general manager of the Beer Café restaurant chain and president of the India's National Restaurant. Association. "But it all comes out of the pockets of restaurants."
The frustration goes beyond India. As the order and delivery of food goes more and more online, Restorers and delivery people around the world are asking questions about the small portion of the cake they receive from powerful guardians such as Zomato in India, Grubhub and DoorDash in the United States and Deliveroo in Europe.
Apps make it easy to order takeaway and restaurants are exposed to a wider audience. But the platforms also charge heavy commissions on each order and can reduce the profit margins of culinary establishments. In the United States, some restaurants have closed, unable to support the cost of using broadcast applications.
The revolt in India underscores how tight the relationship between restaurants and catering applications has become.
"The customer has become hooked now," said Satish Meena, senior forecast analyst at the New Delhi office of Forrester, a global technology research company. "They told the customer that if there was no reduction today, I would wait, because tomorrow there will be another reduction."
Indian food delivery apps said they were providing a valuable and expensive service, underestimated by their partner restaurants. But they are also making changes to the rebellion.
Shortly after the start of the #Logout campaign, the general manager of Zomato, Deepinder Goyal, is excused on Twitter for the financial pain that "bargain hunters" had caused at some restaurants. Last week, he sent an email to all Gold restaurants, announcing 10 changes in response to their concerns, including a daily usage limit and a doubling of the annual subscription price to around $ 25.
But he refused to end the program. He argued that for many restaurants, additional pedestrian traffic was a vital source of business.
"Ninety percent of restaurants say, how can you attract me more customers?" Said Mr. Goyal in an interview. "At the end of the day, it's the choice of the restaurant. Who forces you to be on the gold? "
Mr. Goyal said he understood why some restaurateurs felt that Zomato's delivery commissions were unfair. But he noted that the cost for Zomato to process and deliver an order was about 65 rupees, or 91 cents, while the average order size in India was 235 rupees, or 3.27 dollars.
"We lose 7 rupees per order," he said.
This logic is not very popular among restaurateurs, who are facing a general economic slowdown and higher prices for fruits and vegetables in places like Mumbai.
The restaurateurs said Zomato and Swiggy, which raised nearly $ 2 billion in funding, have decided to postpone cuts to everything else.
The home screens of both apps give the big ticket to restaurants – usually big chains like Burger King or Domino's Pizza – that offer the best deals of the day.
"Sometimes, with all the discounts, it's cheaper for the customer to order online than to cook at home," said Anurag Katriar, who runs a group of European-style restaurants under the Indigo brand and also runs the chapter. from the restaurant association of Mumbai. "For aggregators, it's the number of users and clicks that creates their value."
Customer data is another sore point. Neither Zomato nor Swiggy share the name and phone number of the customers with the restaurant filling the order, citing confidentiality issues. The restaurateurs stated that this left them with no way to market directly or build long-term relationships with their best customers.
Zomato and Swiggy also continue to develop promotions and programs to provide added value to application users, often at the expense of restaurants.
Zomato recently listed about 250 restaurants in an experiment called Infinity, in which guests could eat as much as they wanted in the full menu of a restaurant for a fixed price. The resulting gluttony was difficult to manage for restaurants and resulted in a lot of food wastage. Goyal said Zomato is now considering limiting the number of dinners to items such as pancakes or dosas.
Swiggy, which focuses entirely on delivery, is starting to compete directly with partner restaurants through its own brands, which manufacture food in special conditions, only for delivery. "cloud kitchens. The restaurant industry has asked India's antitrust regulators to block internal brands. Swiggy declined to comment.
Frustrations erupted on August 13, just before India's Independence Day.
About 300 restaurant owners in Gurugram, a suburb of New Delhi housing many high-tech companies, including Zomato, decided they were tired of losing money to Zomato Gold's customers. They entered into a pact to opt out of Gold and other discount programs for a few days, claiming that they wanted "detoxification of consumers of dependency at reduced prices. "
The news of the event has become viral. A few days later, more than 2,000 restaurants – white tablecloths and neighborhood dosa shops – joined them. This week, the sector called for new changes to food distribution programs implemented by key players, including Uber Eats.
The event left Zomato struggling to find the right balance between its competing customer groups: Gold's 1.2 million paying users and the thousands of restaurants it needs to enhance the program.
"Gold has been a super-duper success, and that has been the problem," Goyal said. "Maybe 1% is abusing gold, but it's not the norm."
Anushka Jankar is a typical Gold user, who dined in Vahnilla recently on Tuesday afternoon with two friends. She said that it was her first time there and that she had discovered the place through the application.
Ms. Jankar stated that Gold did not dominate her dining choices, however. "I eat a lot and I'm a great gourmet," she said. "Basically, I use it at the end of the month and the balance of my bank is low."
The program also works better for some restaurants than for others.
Rudresh Agarwal, co-owner of Carpe Diem, a shisha bar-lounge in Kolkata, east India, said he was losing a little money on Gold customers but considered it a way to get visibility. He said that he could bear the losses because he was taking advantage of the alcohol and chicha, or water pipes, that his restaurant serves.
For a place that only offers food, Gold discounts could be devastating. "If you do not have other products, the cost will not work," he said.
Ms Porwal said she was sticking to the Gold program for now. She said she was grateful to fellow restaurateurs for pushing Zomato to improve the program, and wanted to see how the changes will take place, which will come into effect in a few weeks.
Mr. Goyal said that Zomato will continue to listen to the restaurants, even if they do not always agree.
"We know that every time the industry develops, Zomato grows with it," he said.
Ayesha Venkataraman contributed to the reports.
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