We are investing significantly on ‘pods’ to solve the supply gap: Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety

“In the next 10 to 15 years, we aim to have 100 million customers transacting with us over 15 times a month,” said Sriharsha Majety, Co-founder and CEO, Swiggy. He was addressing a packed audience at Bengaluru’s JW Marriott, where the foodtech unicorn is hosting its first tech conference, Gigabytes.

As one of the biggest food delivery platforms in the country, Swiggy has completed over half a billion orders. Present in over 500 cities, it has onboarded around 147,000 restaurants, and has over 2.1 lakh active delivery partners.

Despite the impressive numbers, the fact remains that restaurant penetration in India is still low. “Beijing, for example, has over 300,000 restaurants. Many parts of Bengaluru are still under-penetrated,” Sriharsha noted.

Pods, thus, are Swiggy’s way to ensure deeper supply penetration. “There is a growing demand. Today, close to 10 to 15 meals in a month are eaten out via food delivery. This number is just growing. But the supply is limited, and pods are a way to change that,” he said.

But what, exactly, are Swiggy’s pods? A part of a new business initiative through Swiggy Access by the foodtech firm, it is present in all metro cities.

The idea is that Swiggy Access provides kitchen spaces, called as pods by the company, to different restaurants partners who aren’t present in an area.

For example, there is no presence of biryani chain Meghana Foods in Yelahanka, Bengaluru. A Swiggy Access pod will give Meghana Foods the option of setting up the kitchen in the area, and enable delivery of the food in the area through Swiggy.

“Our pods would be within 10 minutes of 99 percent of our consumers. And close to 75 percent of our demand will come from supply, which doesn’t exist today,” said Harsha.

While ‘Swiggy’ is fast becoming a verb for Indians who are ordering out for food—just like Google did globally for the act of looking up things on the internet—when the foodtech company started out in late 2014, the market was riddled with gaps. And three core problems existed for any consumer who wanted to order in: unreliable delivery, high minimum orders, and poor restaurant selection.

“When we started out, it was a market that we were still building and creating and hacking our way forward in bringing a synergy between tech and logistics. We needed to figure out if we were a tech company or a logistics platform. It was then that we decided that Swiggy aims to elevate the quality of life for urban consumers by offering unparalleled convenience,” Harsha said.

With the theme of Solving Convenience for the Next Billion through Tech and AI, Gigabytes 2019 has been designed to bring together innovators and thought leaders to share insights and build networks.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)