The recent announcement by Zomato a restaurant aggregator and food delivery platform that it would provide 10-minute delivery has sparked off a lively debate on the quick commerce segment. While most of the attention and angst – rightly so – has been focussed on the safety of the riders or delivery personnel in India’s teeming traffic, there are various other aspects to the business.

Issues like the long-term viability of this model, basket size of orders, margins, size of the market they are trying to address, possible regulatory hurdles, whether such experiments have succeeded internationally all have to be looked into.

Several other players especially in the grocery delivery segment like Blinkit, Zepto, and a few others have made such promises and are experimenting with those models. They were not even the pioneers. Even earlier both Ola and Swiggy tried similar quick service through their Dash and Insta programmes with varying degrees of success.

In this podcast, Deputy Editor, Venkatesha Babu who heads the Bengaluru Bureau of Business Line decodes the clamour surrounding the growing ‘Quick Commerce’ market and the current controversies surrounding it.