Swiggy’s new 'Seal Badge' explained: Food delivery platform introduces new program to maintain hygiene

Swiggy, one of India's leading food delivery platforms, has launched a new initiative called the Swiggy Seal, aimed at raising hygiene and food quality standards across its partner restaurants. This move is driven by insights from over 7 million verified customer reviews collected in the past six months. The program is designed to support restaurants in enhancing food safety and cleanliness while ensuring that customers can trust the quality of the food they order.

What is the Swiggy Seal?

The Swiggy Seal is a badge that restaurants can earn by maintaining high hygiene and food safety standards. The company claims it's awarded based on real customer feedback. The seal will try to focus some existing problems with the food delivery ecosystem. The company claims it will focus on key areas like:

• Contamination prevention
• Proper cooking techniques
• Packaging quality

Restaurants that receive the Seal will have the badge displayed on their Swiggy menu pages, showing customers their commitment to cleanliness. This initiative is currently being tested in Pune and will expand to over 650 cities across India in the coming months.

Support for restaurants

Swiggy claims it will also offer dedicated support to help restaurants improve. This includes:

• Account managers and systematic reports to help restaurants meet hygiene standards.
• Access to professional hygiene audits through partnerships with FSSAI-accredited agencies like Eurofins and Equinox at discounted rates.
• Webinars on hygiene best practices and exclusive pricing on services like cleaning and pest control.

Earlier this year, in a tragic incident in Patiala, a young girl passed away after consuming her birthday cake ordered using Zomato. The food delivery company then announced that the restaurant has been removed from its platform. Furthermore, they barred the restaurant owner from operating any entities on Zomato in the future. 

Zomato also introduced a Hygiene rating system in 2019. However, most restaurants have not been tagged with any specific hygiene-related badge.