Shutting down Zomato Quick, Everyday: CEO Deepinder Goyal; gives reasons for subdued NOV growth

Eternal (formerly Zomato) chief executive Deepinder Goyal on Thursday announced the closure of its 15-minute food delivery service Zomato Quick and meal service Everyday. "We are actually shutting down both these initiatives as we are not seeing the path to profitability in these without compromising on customer experience. The current restaurant density & kitchen infrastructure is not set up for delivering orders in 10 minutes which leads to inconsistent customer experience. As a result, we did not see any incrementality in demand while we ran Quick as an experiment for a few months," he stated.

"With Everyday, we realized that the need for homely-meals is a limited use case largely for office locations in metros. We did not see enough ROI by keeping it running at a small scale," Goyal added.

The Eternal CEO also highlighted key reasons behind the current slowdown in food delivery, which were a sluggish demand environment (especially on discretionary spends), shortage of delivery partners and competition from quick delivery of packaged food from quick commerce.

"On top of these, in this quarter, two other factors impacted growth. We delisted ~19,000 restaurants who either a) did not pass muster on hygiene standards based on severe customer escalations, b) were mimicking established brands and misleading customers, or c) operating multiple identical menu listings to hog more listing impressions. As one of the leading food delivery platforms, we think it is critical to weed out bad actors which erode trust in the category. While this did impact order volumes, this was the right thing to do for the long term," he mentioned.

"There was one less day in Q4 FY25 compared to the same period last year (which was a leap year). Adjusted for the above two specific factors, NOV (net order value) growth could have been higher by about 2 percentage points," Goyal further stated. NOV growth remained subdued and well below the 20 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth
guidance.

The company reported a 77.71 per cent YoY drop in its consolidated net profit for the January-March 2025 quarter, fuelled by a rise in expenses. During the three months under review, profit slipped to Rs 39 crore as against Rs 175 crore in the corresponding period last year.

The online food and delivery services platform's revenue from operations, however, jumped 63.75 per cent to Rs 5,833 crore in Q4 FY25 from Rs 3,562 crore in the year-ago period. Expenses increased by 67.88 per cent to Rs 6,104 crore in the March 2025 quarter in comparison with Rs 3,636 crore in Q4 FY24.

Meanwhile, Eternal shares settled 0.58 per cent higher at Rs 232.50 on Wednesday. Domestic benchmarks remained closed today due to 'Maharashtra Day'. Trading will resume at usual hours on Friday.