Zomato bet on 10-minute food from its own finishing stations, then rebranded it

Zomato is India's largest food-delivery platform; Instant was its owned-kitchen answer to slow restaurant delivery.

That company-run finishing stations with a small, demand-predictable menu could make 10-minute cooked-food delivery scale where restaurant kitchens could not

Zomato launched the 10-minute programme in March 2022. Founder-CEO Deepinder Goyal: 'After becoming a frequent customer of Blinkit… I started feeling that the 30-minute average delivery time by Zomato is too slow, and will soon have to become obsolete.'

In January 2023, ET reported Zomato was planning to shut Instant as the segment showed no signs of turning profitable — 'not getting the daily volume required to even pay the fixed costs'. A Zomato spokesperson rejected this: 'Instant is not shutting down', saying the company was working on a new menu with partners and rebranding, with all finishing stations intact and no employees impacted.

Restaurants can't cook fast enough for 10-minute promises, so Zomato took kitchen control in-house with finishing stations — the same logic that later drove Blinkit's Bistro.

A 20-30 dish menu tuned to demand predictability keeps inventory risk small but also caps order volume in low-density pin codes.

The shutdown report and the denial arrived together: fixed-cost stations make the break-even volume brutally visible every morning.

Owning the kitchen is how a marketplace tries to fix delivery time — but fixed-cost stations need volume to pay for themselves, and 'rebrand it' is the answer you give when the volumes haven't come.

Zomato kept piloting new formats: intercity delivery under Intercity Legends had launched in August 2022, and the June 2022 Blinkit acquisition anchored the company's quick-commerce bet.