Food serving apps, Zomato and Swiggy might delist your favourite restaurent soon. Zomato on Tuesday announced that it will be de-listing hundreds of restaurants which are not compliant with the regulations set by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) from its food delivery platform. Joining forces with FSSAI to take strict actions in the interest of public health, Zomato has removed the restaurants which have not been able to furnish an FSSAI license to the platform.
As and when these restaurants provide Zomato with their FSSAI licenses, they will be re-listed on Zomato's food delivery platform. Some restaurants, which have not been able to provide their FSSAI licenses but have high Zomato ratings and/or high repeat order volumes on Zomato, have been given until the end of September to furnish their licenses.
As a part of the blog announcing the move, Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato said, "At Zomato, we care about our users as much as we care about our restaurant partners. Without a balance between these two elements, we wouldn't be able to adhere to our long-held mission better food for more people. However, it hurts us when regulations and hygiene standards are not followed by restaurants."
“For us, it’s a matter of taking the right call because at the end of the day, the wellbeing of our users matter immensely to us. As and when these restaurants provide us their FSSAI licences, we will enable them for online ordering services,” Goyal said.
In fact, Zomato is going to make sure that it doesn’t list any cloud kitchen on Zomato unless and until it goes through the company’s mandatory hygiene check, which is a food safety and hygiene checklist, he added.
“This hygiene check is conducted by reputed third parties who are experts at this,” Goyal said. These measures will certainly help strengthen the ecosystem as it will filter out parties that aren’t keen on prioritising the users’ interest, he added.
On the other hand, Swiggy has already started the delisting process. “We have set up an FSSAI Assist Program to help all non-compliant restaurants procure their licenses within the specified timeframe,” said a spokesperson at Swiggy.
(With inputs from Agencies)
