Flipkart readies food delivery push to break Zomato and Swiggy's grip on India

Flipkart moves on India's food-delivery duopoly

Walmart-owned Flipkart is preparing to enter India's food-delivery market, setting up a direct challenge to Zomato and Swiggy, the two platforms that have dominated the category for years. According to TechCrunch, which cited two people familiar with the plans, the Bengaluru-based e-commerce company has been testing the service internally and has grown the trial from a few hundred employees to more than 8,000.

The company has also assembled a dedicated rider fleet through Ekart, its logistics arm, kept separate from the riders who handle its quick-commerce orders. Inside Flipkart's main shopping app, the employee-only service appears as its own tab alongside the Minutes quick-commerce offering and travel bookings. Restaurant inventory comes from two channels: listings on ONDC, the government-backed network that connects online buyers and sellers across platforms, and restaurants Flipkart has signed up directly. Riders in jerseys branded "Eat-in by Minutes" have already been seen fulfilling orders on the streets of Bengaluru, where the company is headquartered.

A market that has humbled big entrants

India's food-delivery market has a history of defeating well-funded challengers. Amazon introduced a food-ordering service in Bengaluru in 2020 and shut it down two years later. Google's Areo app, which bundled food ordering with other services, never gained traction. Uber exited in 2020, selling its Indian Uber Eats business to Zomato.

Even so, the market keeps growing. Brokerage firm Bernstein estimates that Indian food delivery is expanding 18% to 20% a year, though online ordering still accounts for just over 15% of the country's broader food-services industry. Zomato, owned by Eternal, and Swiggy together serve an estimated 85 million to 95 million paying customers annually, according to Bernstein — a sign of how dominant they are, but also of the headroom in a country with more than a billion internet subscriptions.

Commissions are the battleground

Flipkart is not the only newcomer pressuring the incumbents. Ride-hailing company Rapido has been scaling Ownly, a food-delivery service that charges restaurants no commission, while Swiggy itself has launched Toing, a separate app aimed at customers looking for cheaper meals.

Sagar Daryani, president of the National Restaurant Association of India, which represents more than 500,000 restaurants, argues the trade has long needed alternatives. "Monopoly is bad, but duopoly is more pathetic," he told TechCrunch. "What one does, the other follows suit."

Daryani, also co-founder and CEO of the dumpling chain Wow! Momo Foods, said Flipkart has proposed a base commission of about 10%, compared with the 20% to 25% restaurants typically pay Zomato and Swiggy. Headline commissions are only part of the cost: once advertising, discounts and other promotions are included, restaurants can end up spending 40% to 50% of an order's value on the established platforms. He expects Flipkart's total cost to restaurants to land closer to 15% to 16%.

Winning customers is the harder part

Better economics for restaurants does not automatically translate into switching. Bernstein estimates that more efficient entrants could pass on savings of just ₹20 to ₹30 — roughly 20 to 30 cents — per order, which may not be enough to pull customers away from Zomato and Swiggy. The incumbents could also answer with deeper discounts of their own.

Launch plans and the IPO backdrop

According to Daryani, Flipkart has told restaurants it expects to launch the service publicly by the end of October and to expand to five or six cities by the end of the year. The push comes as Flipkart's long-anticipated stock-market listing remains unscheduled; Chief Executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy recently declined to give a timetable. The company is also facing tougher e-commerce competition, with quick-commerce platforms that began with groceries now selling phones and other discretionary goods. Flipkart did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.

Why it matters

Flipkart's approach inverts the playbook that Zomato and Swiggy followed, and that Amazon, Google and Uber failed with. Instead of starting from food and branching into quick commerce, it is using an established e-commerce business and a growing rapid-delivery network as its entry point — which, as Daryani notes, could make the food operation leaner and more efficient from the start. If a roughly 10% commission structure holds, it would put pressure on the economics that sustain the duopoly and hand restaurants bargaining power they have lacked for years. Food delivery is also a high-frequency habit, useful for pulling users back into Flipkart's app ahead of a possible IPO. The caution: deep pockets have not been enough in this market before, and a saving of 20 to 30 cents per order may not move loyal customers at all.