Deepinder Goyal said restaurant business is difficult and not at all easy to run. So will Zomato open restaurants now?
Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal said that his company will never open its own restaurants or cloud kitchens as it will be unethical. Talking to celebrity chef Anahita Dhondy on his podcast ‘Breaking Bread’, Deepinder Goyal said restaurant business is difficult and Zomato would never enter that space.
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The Zomato CEO said, “We don’t want to do restaurants. It’s a very hard business. We don’t want to compete with restaurants. Never. I think it’s not ethical to do it. I mean if we have built a platform working with you [restaurants] then we have sort of leveraged your presence to build this. We can’t go back and say ‘accha main bhi ye karoonga’ (I will also do it). It’s not ethical.”
But what if he was forced to do so? Zomato CEO remained sure of his response and said, “Never. It’s been like: no chance. Honestly, if I had to, I would still not do it. I have so much respect for restaurant owners and chefs. It’s the one of the hardest businesses to run.”
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He added that the business is not easy to run as “I think a lot of people like when they get out of college or they want to quit a job, they say ‘yaar, restaurant kholna hai mujhe’. And I am like ‘dude, that’s the hardest business ever made. So, please, don’t think about it as there’s so much more to it’.”
“I would say every single business needs a certain amount of blood, sweat and tears to build. Restaurants take more blood, sweat tears to build a business. You have to be really passionate and have the energy every single day. You can’t take one day off. You take one day off, things will fall,” he continued.
He also said that a large percentage of the food delivery platform’s users already believe Zomato runs the restaurants.
“One of our largest negative reviews is: ‘I didn’t like the quality of food’. I think maybe 30-40% of the customers out there don’t really know that we don’t make the food. They think all the restaurants are Zomato restaurants,” he said.
