Zomato Continues Its Aggressive Expansion; Also Launches a Food Porn Site!

Tuesday November 06, 2012 , 3 min Read

InfoEdge has shown huge confidence in Zomato and so have the consumers. After being successful in India, Zomato went international with UAE. Providing in-depth information on over 6,500 restaurants across the three cities, Zomato has become UAE's most extensive restaurant discovery platform for anyone looking to eat out or get food delivered. We also got in touch with Zomato’s Head of International Expansion, Albiner Dhindsa to learn about their plans.“We launched our Dubai section last month and have received a phenomenal response so far. In a short span of 1 month, we have over 5,000 users visiting Zomato Dubai every day to decide where to eat out or order from. This response has further strengthened our belief that there is a huge need of Zomato’s services in the entire Middle East and we are looking forward to a successful launch of our Abu Dhabi and Sharjah sections,” says Albinder.

Zomato has now expanded and reached to Abu Dhabi and Sharjah in the Middle East and Colombo in Sri Lanka. Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO Zomato said, "Along with some macro level indicators, we do a thorough on-ground research across several metrics (data collection, merchant partnerships, user engagement etc) before entering a new market! Colombo fit in into our expansion plans perfectly. Favorable metrics and the limited product customisation required for the local market aided in replicating our model seamlessly here. After Middle East, we are looking forward to a successful launch and market response in Colombo."

Zomato is now 4 years old and gets more than 6 million users every month who use Zomato to discover the best places to eat around them. Zomato was founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, both IIT Delhi graduates and ex-Bain employees, in July 2008 for New Delhi. Since then, Zomato has expanded its services to 17 cities in India, Sri Lanka and UAE covering over 49,500 restaurants. Zomato ventured into the international markets with the launch of their Dubai section last month. The Abu Dhabi Sharjah and Colombo launch is in line with Zomato’s plans to further expand into more cities in Middle East and South East Asia by end of 2012.

On a different leash, last week, Zomato put an outrageous spin on the Instagram contest they ran back in August. Using a TLD reserved exclusively for pornographic websites, www.zomato.xxx has been dubbed ‘The World’s Most Delicious Porn Site’. And quite rightly so, the website is a hedonistic delight, with 1400+ images of food and drink, or as it would be called in this day and age, food porn. Contributing to the page is as simple as taking a photo using Instagram and captioning it with the hashtag #Zomato.

The response, so far, has surpassed expectations. In under a week, the page has already seen over 25000 hits, more than 100 eligible submissions, and a flood of tweets talking about it.