Swiggy and Zomato saw an increase in orders on New Year's Eve (NYE), with cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai putting a stop to celebrations in light of the new Covid variant around 9 p.m. on Friday foodtech unicorns announced that they had exceeded 2 million orders for the day.
According to Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, Zomato witnessed 6,000 orders per minute at around 7 p.m. on Friday, its highest ever, and the number was expected to rise further and peak at 8:30 p.m. He also tweeted that the foodtech app was experiencing a surge in app openings, with the number of live orders reaching 165,000 just before 7 p.m.
Rival Swiggy tweeted just a few minutes later that it had reached 6,600 orders per minute. "On Swiggy's first New Year Eve in 2014, as a three-month-old food delivery platform, we did one order every three minutes. How times have changed," Swiggy's Founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety said. He further said that he would step outside of his comfort zone to share New Year's Eve ordering updates on the microblogging platform.
Sharing order metrics for Blinkit (formerly Grofers), in which Zomato invested $100 million for a stake of around 10 percent in 2021, Goyal tweeted: "7,000 packs of nachos have already been ordered. And 43,000 aerated aerated drinks. Not going to share the stats on condoms”.
Due to night curfews and prohibitions on festivities in various states, New Year's Eve will be quiet at restaurants and bars. Due to local regulations, cafes and clubs have either cancelled or scaled back their events. Delhi and Uttar Pradesh have enforced a night curfew, while Chennai has prohibited all cars other than emergency vehicles from Friday midnight to 5 a.m. on Saturday.
A spokesperson for Swiggy said earlier it hoped to fulfil the expected surge in orders smoothly. "We've boosted up our teams in anticipation of a rise in orders for New Year's." We have done hyper local demand-supply planning and determined the specific slots where demand will grow owing to early ordering patterns. Delivery partners’ incentives and schemes are also tailored to satisfy this early ordering pattern,” said a spokesperson.
"We expect that this year will be no different, and we are fully prepared for it. We have increased the capacity of our delivery fleet as well as our support and operations staff to ensure customers have a great experience on the platform on the day," a Zomato spokesperson said on December 30.
