Like elsewhere, the battle between real world vendors and their aggregator app platforms has reached the food delivery world as well. Latest is the complaint filed with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) as well as the prime minister's office by the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI).
Restaurants complained that food delivery app companies like Swiggy, Zomato, Food Panda and Uber Eats are using their dominant position to push through unreasonable discounts, as well as restrictive practices like cloud kitchens and supply chains. “The companies have been continuously found to misuse their dominant position with the aim to wipe out small and medium enterprises,” according to the complaint filed with CCI.
NRAI's Delivery Task Force met representatives of four leading aggregators to voice their concerns on Tuesday. The main issues discussed included deep discounting, data masking, right to use own logistics, private labels and ad hoc campaigns.
“Concerns have been well taken by all of them,” Rahul Singh, president of NRAI said after the meeting. “We aim to continue these meetings on a bi-monthly basis for communicating feedback from the restaurant industry to the aggregators to ensure a healthy business environment for all stakeholders,” he added.
The restaurant industry's grouse include the many discounts that the platforms offer, to which they have no option but to go along, or be left out. Another recent thorn on the side has been cloud kitchens and the aggregators themselves getting into businesses linked to the supply chain, for example, Swiggy's cloud kitchen venture Bowl Company in Bengaluru, and Zomato's HyperPure, a supplier of vegetables, meat and even packaging. Restaurateurs allege that Bowl Kitchen is promoted at their cost on the platform, while many restaurants are being pressurised to source from HyperPure.
The recent government move after protests from trade associations to clip the wings of e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart citing FDI rules seems to have energised those in similar situations, though FDI rules are not applicable on Swiggy or Zomato. It is not clear whether it applies to Uber Eats, the food delivery arm of the US-based taxi aggregator giant Uber.
Similarly, associations of brick-and-mortar pharmacy traders had in recent months approached the courts with complaints against the many e-pharmas, online websites selling medicines. Drug stores across the country even went on a nation-wide shutdown in protest.
