A couple of months back, Zomato published a report saying that it expects food delivery volumes to hit pre-COVID levels within 3 months. Zomato’s founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has now taken to Twitter to share that the food delivery volume has returned back to pre-COVID levels and is at over 120 percent of pre-COVID peaks in a few cities.
Deepinder Goyal says that the company has received a total of 9.2 crore orders since March this year. He expects the food delivery sector to grow at up to 25 percent on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future.
Happy to share that India food delivery volumes have reached pre-COVID peaks. A number of cities are now at over 120% of pre-COVID peaks.
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— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) October 12, 2020
According to Goyal, there have been no reported cases of COVID transmission through food delivery or the company’s delivery agents. However, there has at least been one incident where the company published a notice mentioning that a restaurant staff from the Malviya Nagar area in Delhi tested positive for Coronavirus. Goyal also quotes the WHO and says that ‘people should not fear food, or food packaging, or processing or delivery of food.’
“The last few months have been full of shocks and surprises. We salute the hard work of our delivery partners, along with thousands of our restaurant partners who demonstrated great agility in implementing world-class safety practices to ensure that our customers stay safe,” wrote Goyal.
With all that said, it is worth mentioning that the increase in food delivery should not be taken as a metric to indicate that the COVID situation has improved. According to the latest numbers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering coronavirus dashboard, India globally stands second in terms of the overall cases, at over 70 lakh reported cases.
