Food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato have made it easier to satisfy our cravings for our favorite dishes. We demand, and they deliver. With plenty of offers to entice customers, and a wide variety of restaurants under their wing, they’ve pretty much monopolized the food delivery market in India. It is no surprise that they’ve started delivering groceries and packages too. With their aggressive marketing strategies, they’ve managed to find customers in different cities and expand their operations across the country.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who go to bed daily with an empty stomach. According to the Global Hunger Index 2019, India ranks 102 of 117 countries, well below its neighbors Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. There are plenty of organizations that try and help people in need. However, thanks to an ever-growing population and tremendous wastage – hunger and malnutrition remain an issue.
Project Takeaway
We are no strangers to wasting food. Every year there are reports of tonnes of food grains rotting in warehouses. While this can be blamed on insufficient or sub-standard storage infrastructure, households and institutions also contribute heavily to food wastage. Most houses usually have leftover food that eventually gets thrown away. Weddings, restaurants, hotels, canteens, family functions are also significant contributors. It is encouraging to see some hotels and restaurants acknowledging this problem and donating their leftover food to those in need (orphanages/NGOs) or distributing it among their staff.
There are plenty of organizations that are working towards reducing food waste by collecting and distributing food to those in need. However, they are usually not part of a bigger system and remain one-off attempts. Given their large customer and restaurant base, food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato could have a big say in combating food wastage. They might even end up living up to their tagline of being “Hunger Saviors.” Having decentralized and branded community refrigerators that collect leftovers from households could help in a big way.
The proposed concept has the potential to be scaled up on a national level, with public relations benefits for the companies involved. NGOs and CSR funds can also help in the cause.
Approach
To get a better understanding of the situation, we conducted several semi-structured interviews with delivery persons. We also spoke to different restaurant owners about their willingness to deploy a community fridge in their premises. My teammate and I found that a lot of them are receptive to the idea and themselves have an old Coke/Pepsi cooler lying somewhere.
Sample Questionnaire
| Delivery Executives | Restaurant Owners |
|---|---|
| Name and age of the delivery executive. | Are they partnering with any food delivery apps such as Swiggy or Zomato? |
| Number of orders per day? | Is there any left-over food at the end of the day? |
| How many deliveries are done at a time? | What happens to extra food in restaurants? |
| How many restaurants get assigned to a delivery executive? | Order gets cancelled during preparation – so what does the restaurant do? |
| Do customer ratings affect the number of restaurant assigned to them? | Order is prepared, but gets cancelled at the last minute? |
| What happens to all the food orders which get cancelled? | Would they be willing to host a community fridge which can be accessed by everyone in their premises? |
| What happens to extra food in restaurants? | |
| Does he deliver only in one particular area or does he deliver to other areas in Bangalore as well? | |
| How do they manage their own food? |
Proposed Concept
- The process of ordering food pretty much remains the same. Before proceeding to pay for the items, a customer may choose to indicate (through a checkbox) they have fresh leftovers for the needy/homeless, which they would prefer to donate.
- The food is then packed nicely and labeled appropriately with the name of the donor, food item, date of preparation, date of expiry — and whether it is vegetarian or not.
- A delivery person may refuse to collect the leftovers if the packaging and labeling by the customer are not appropriate. Ideally, he/she should verbally ask the customer about the quality of food, for formality’s sake.
- Delivery person will always attend to any waiting customer first (sometimes they cater to two orders at a time) and then drop off any donated food to the nearest community refrigerator before another order — directions to it get shown on the map.
- Partnering restaurants are incentivized through special badges, labels, or awards to put these refrigerators outside their premises. Restaurant staff monitor the contents of the fridge. Canceled food orders can also find their way into these fridges. The restaurants can feature as a “Hunger Saviour” on the app to customers.
- Restaurants need not be the only custodians for the community refrigerator. Other interested parties such as resident welfare associations, NGOs, colleges, schools, hostels, paying guest accommodations (some of which have excess food daily) can also act as custodians.
- There should be a bold, clearly legible infographic with instructions in local languages as well as English communicating the behavior expected of both donors and takers.
- Garbage bins for wet and dry waste should also be present near the refrigerator. The refrigerator provides a pen and logbook for those donating on the spot.
Project Boycott
Getting food delivered to our houses by tapping a few buttons is convenient. However, the amount of plastic waste generated usually goes unnoticed. By now, we are all well aware of the nature of plastic and its harmful effects on the environment. Yet very little is done from the likes of Swiggy and Zomato to reduce the amount of plastic circulated around the country. Also, when it comes to “recycling” plastic, we mostly end up burning them or throwing them in landfills.
While Zomato allows its customers to opt-out from getting cutlery delivered, the same cannot be said about Swiggy. The option to opt-out of cutlery isn’t a default option and, in most cases, may go unnoticed by the customer while checking out. It won’t be long before one’s house begins to overflow with paper napkins, spoons, forks, and plastic containers. While one can be creative about reusing these containers to grow plants or make hats out of them, the majority of us will eventually end up throwing them. And we all know where they end up after that.
Proposed Concept
- Adding a “Don’t send cutlery” or “cutlery not required” checkbox to the order page of every food delivery app should be made mainstream.
- Having this option to opt-out or opt-in for cutlery should be visible to the customer. As seen earlier, in the case of the Zomato app, it is easy to miss it because of its placement at the very bottom of the screen. Placing it higher up the screen should help.
- The option to opt-out of cutlery should be the default setting. However, if a customer would like to opt-in for cutlery, he/she can choose either a standard set of cutlery for a fixed amount or individual pieces separately as per their need.
- Hopefully, by charging people a small amount for their plastic cutlery, it nudges them towards not opting for it in the long run.
- For the likes of Swiggy, Zomato, and other food delivery platforms, who are already responsible for contributing so much plastic to the environment, this move would be a step towards being more environmentally friendly.
- Of course, this does not mean we see the last of plastic items being used by food delivery platforms. Most of the home-delivered food items come packed in plastic containers. This trend is bound to continue until we figure out better alternatives for plastic.
Conclusion
Swiggy and Zomato are two of the most popular food delivery platforms out there. Be it in any corner of a city or any small town, it is no surprise to see them battle it out to be the number one food delivery app. While they pride themselves as hunger saviors, there is a lot more they can do when it comes to ending hunger and food wastage. Branded community refrigerators not only helps reduce hunger and food wastage but also serves as a way of marketing themselves further.
As far as plastic usage is concerned, small steps like allowing customers to opt-out of plastic cutlery will help the environment in the long run. Customers, in turn, will be encouraged to make more environmentally conscious decisions in the future. The next step would be to think of ways to recycle or reuse the plastic food containers instead of them ending up in landfills. Also, it doesn’t hurt for a brand to be labeled “environmentally-conscious” when approaching investors.