Zomato Everyday: The Rise and Wind-Down of an Affordable Meal Delivery Model

Industry & Competitive Context

India's online food delivery market is one of the fastest-growing digital consumer sectors globally, and by most industry estimates, a near-duopoly. Independent market research firm Ken Research estimates that Zomato held approximately 58% share and Swiggy approximately 34% share of India's online food delivery market in 2024, with the two platforms together handling the overwhelming majority of restaurant-aggregated delivery volume (Ken Research, "India Online Food Delivery Market Share, Companies & Trends Report 2026-2031"). Zomato itself, operating under its listed corporate entity, reported approximately 247,000 active restaurant partners as of March 2024 and 20.9 million average monthly transacting food-delivery customers in India in Q4 FY2025 (Ken Research, citing company-disclosed figures).

Both major platforms went public in India within a few years of each other Zomato Limited listed on the BSE and NSE in July 2021, at an IPO price of Rs 76 per share, while Swiggy completed its IPO in November 2024 (Business Standard, September 14, 2021; Entrepreneur India, November 13, 2025). Since going public, the competitive centre of gravity in Indian food and grocery delivery has increasingly shifted toward quick commerce: Redseer estimated that India's roughly 10-minute delivery segment had scaled to a gross merchandise value exceeding USD 10 billion with more than 30 million users, and both Zomato (via Blinkit) and Swiggy (via Instamart, Bolt, and Snacc) have invested heavily in this adjacent, faster-delivery category (Entrepreneur India, November 13, 2025, citing Redseer). It was against this backdrop of speed-led competitive investment that Zomato piloted "Zomato Everyday" a service built not around speed, but around price and a "home-style" meal proposition.

Brand Situation Prior to the Everyday Launch

Zomato Everyday did not emerge from a blank slate; it was the direct successor to an earlier, unsuccessful experiment. Restaurant India reported that Zomato Everyday "takes the place of Zomato Instant," under which the company had earlier attempted to offer 10-minute food delivery (Restaurant India, February 23, 2023). Business of Food's later coverage confirmed that Zomato Instant, which promised 10-minute deliveries in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR after its 2022 launch, "was discontinued by January 2023" (Business of Food, October 3, 2025). Zomato Everyday was thus launched within weeks of Zomato Instant's discontinuation, marking a strategic pivot away from ultra-fast delivery and toward an affordability-and-authenticity positioning for a different consumer need state.

Strategic Objective

According to the company's own announcement, quoted across multiple outlets, Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal framed the objective as providing "the comfort of affordable homely meals delivered to your doorsteps" (Zee Business, February 22, 2023). Trade coverage described the service's intended audience explicitly: afaqs!-affiliated and other trade outlets, along with Zomato's own characterisation, stated that Everyday was designed "primarily targeting office-goers in metro cities" who lacked regular access to home-cooked food (afaqs!, May 28, 2026, recapping the service's original 2023 positioning). Trend Hunter's coverage similarly noted the service was "tailored to individuals who live away from their families and do not have regular access to homemade meals" (Trend Hunter, February 22, 2023). The stated strategic objective was therefore narrow and need-state specific: capture daily, weekday, office-hours meal occasions among urban migrants and working professionals through a value-priced, "tastes like home" alternative to restaurant-style delivery rather than a broad-based competitive push against Swiggy or Zomato's own core restaurant marketplace.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

Zomato Everyday launched on February 22, 2023, initially available only in select areas of Gurugram (Business Standard, February 22, 2023; BusinessToday, February 22, 2023). The operating model, as described in Zomato's own blog post at launch, involved the company's "food partners" collaborating with "home-chefs," who would "design each recipe with love and care to serve you home-styled, wholesome food at the best prices within minutes" (Zee Business, February 22, 2023, quoting Zomato's blog post and Goyal). Meals were priced starting at Rs 89, positioning the service well below typical restaurant-delivery price points (Business Standard; BusinessToday; Zee Business, all February 22, 2023).

The consumer-facing execution was designed for simplicity: users accessed Everyday through a dedicated section within the main Zomato app, browsed a curated menu, personalised meal components, and paid online or via cash on delivery (Zee Business, February 22, 2023). Business of Food's later retrospective coverage specified that Everyday offered "affordable, ready-to-eat homely meals within a two-kilometre radius" of fulfilment points, indicating a hyperlocal, dark-kitchen-adjacent operating radius rather than city-wide delivery (Business of Food, October 3, 2025).

Following its Gurugram pilot, the service was expanded to Mumbai, as documented in trade coverage describing Zomato "bringing home-cooked meals to more customers" in that city (Brandz Magazine, July 3, 2024, describing the Mumbai expansion of a service "launched in early 2023 as a remodelled version of Zomato's previous service, Zomato Instant").

Positioning & Consumer Insight

Everyday's positioning rested on two linked insights, both explicitly stated in company and press communication rather than inferred: first, that a meaningful segment of urban food-delivery users specifically office-based professionals living away from family value the emotional and nutritional connotation of "home-style" food over restaurant variety or novelty; and second, that this occasion is fundamentally price-sensitive and habitual (a daily or near-daily need) rather than occasional or celebratory, unlike much of Zomato's core restaurant-order business. Goyal's own description of the service as delivering "the comfort of affordable homely meals" (Zee Business, February 22, 2023) directly targeted this insight, distinguishing Everyday's brand promise comfort and affordability from the discovery- and variety-led promise of the core Zomato marketplace.

This positioning also differentiated Everyday from Zomato Instant, its speed-led predecessor. Where Instant had competed on delivery time, Everyday deliberately competed on price and emotional resonance, an implicit acknowledgment, later made explicit by Goyal, that fast fulfilment infrastructure was not the binding constraint for this occasion (see Section 7).

Media & Channel Strategy

Public documentation indicates the service was announced and communicated primarily through Zomato's own corporate blog and product-launch press release, distributed via business and consumer technology press (Business Standard, BusinessToday, Zee Business, Trend Hunter, Restaurant India all February 22–23, 2023), and was distributed to consumers as an in-app feature within the existing Zomato platform rather than as a stand-alone application. This is consistent with Zomato's broader pattern of using in-app feature launches and shareholder/investor communication (rather than mass-media campaigns) to introduce experimental service lines, a pattern also seen with the subsequent Zomato Quick pilot (see Section 7).

Business & Brand Outcomes

Zomato Everyday's operating history and its termination are unusually well documented because both were disclosed directly by the company through its formal investor communication channel the CEO's letter to shareholders accompanying quarterly results rather than through leaked or third-party reporting.

On May 1, 2025, alongside Zomato's (by then renamed Eternal's) Q4 FY25 results, Goyal announced the discontinuation of both Zomato Quick (a 15-minute delivery pilot introduced a few months earlier) and Zomato Everyday. In his letter, quoted by multiple outlets, Goyal stated: "We are actually shutting down both these initiatives as we are not seeing the path to profitability in these without compromising on customer experience" (BusinessToday, May 1, 2025; BusinessWorld, undated 2025 coverage). On Everyday specifically, Goyal stated: "With Everyday, we realised that the need for homely-meals is a limited use case, largely for office locations in metros. We did not see enough ROI by keeping it running at a small scale" (BusinessWorld, citing the Q4 FY25 shareholder letter). Business of Food's coverage similarly reported that Everyday "saw limited traction," was "primarily used in metro office locations," and "did not yield sufficient return on investment to justify its continuation" (Business of Food, October 3, 2025).

The financial context in which this decision was disclosed is also publicly documented: Eternal's (formerly Zomato's) consolidated net profit fell 77.71% year-on-year to Rs 39 crore in Q4 FY25, compared with Rs 175 crore in the year-ago quarter, even as revenue from operations rose 63.75% year-on-year to Rs 5,833 crore, driven by rising expenses of 67.88% year-on-year to Rs 6,104 crore (BusinessToday, May 1, 2025).

Separately, and for context, the underlying corporate entity itself was renamed from Zomato Limited to Eternal Limited, with board approval on February 6, 2025 and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs formally recording the change effective March 20, 2025; the consumer-facing Zomato brand and app name were explicitly unaffected by this corporate rebrand (Business Standard, March 10, 2025; Ventura Securities, April 9, 2025). Both Quick and Everyday were confirmed to have been "removed from the Zomato app" following the shutdown decision (Business of Food, October 3, 2025).

Strategic Implications

Zomato Everyday's trajectory launch, limited geographic rollout, and formal discontinuation disclosed by the CEO in investor communication offers several documented strategic lessons appropriate for MBA-level analysis, each grounded strictly in the company's own public statements rather than external speculation.

First, Goyal's own framing of the shutdown as an "ROI at small scale" problem is a direct, company-sourced acknowledgment that Everyday was never scaled beyond a pilot footprint (Gurugram, later Mumbai) during its roughly two-year life. This is consistent with a broader pattern publicly visible in Zomato/Eternal's experimentation approach: both Zomato Instant (10-minute delivery, discontinued within roughly a year of launch) and Zomato Quick (15-minute delivery, discontinued within a few months of a pilot) were also wound down after being run only as constrained trials, with Goyal explicitly stating for Quick that "the current restaurant density and kitchen infrastructure is not set up for delivering orders in 10 minutes, which leads to an inconsistent customer experience" (BusinessToday, May 1, 2025). Read together, these three sequential shutdowns Instant, Everyday, and Quick indicate a company-stated pattern of testing adjacent service formats at limited scale and applying a disciplined profitability filter before committing further capital, rather than scaling experimental formats on growth expectations alone.

Second, Goyal's explicit statement that "the need for homely-meals is a limited use case, largely for office locations in metros" is a rare instance of a public company directly disclosing that a stated consumer insight, while directionally correct, did not translate into an addressable market large enough to justify continued investment. This distinction between an insight being true and an insight being commercially sufficient is a documented, company-acknowledged outcome rather than an external analyst's inference, and is analytically significant: it demonstrates that emotionally resonant positioning (comfort, home-style authenticity) does not, on its own, guarantee unit economics at scale in a price-sensitive, low-ticket-size category.

Third, the timing of Everyday's shutdown disclosed in the same shareholder letter as a 77.71% year-on-year decline in consolidated net profit situates the decision within a broader, company-disclosed shift toward profitability discipline across Eternal's portfolio during FY25, a period that also included the company's rebrand to Eternal Limited to reflect the growing weight of its Blinkit quick-commerce business relative to core food delivery.

Discussion Questions

1. Deepinder Goyal publicly distinguished between a consumer insight being directionally valid ("the need for homely-meals" existing) and being commercially sufficient to justify continued investment. What frameworks would you use to test, before rather than after launch, whether a validated consumer need is large enough to scale profitably?

   
   

2. Zomato Everyday, Zomato Instant, and Zomato Quick were each launched, piloted at limited geographic scale, and discontinued within roughly one to two years. What are the advantages and risks of this "fast pilot, fast kill" approach to innovation for a publicly listed platform company, compared with committing to a longer runway before a profitability judgment is made?

   
   

3. Everyday operated within a stated two-kilometre delivery radius aimed at metro office locations. How does a hyperlocal, occasion-specific service like this create different unit-economics challenges than Zomato's core, city-wide restaurant delivery marketplace?

   
   

4. The Everyday shutdown was disclosed in the same shareholder letter that reported a steep year-on-year decline in consolidated net profit. What does the choice to disclose service-level strategic decisions through investor communication (rather than separate press announcements) suggest about how a listed company manages the narrative around underperforming initiatives?

   
   

5. Zomato/Eternal has now discontinued three distinct adjacent food-delivery formats (Instant, Everyday, Quick) while its quick-commerce business, Blinkit, has continued to scale. Based only on the publicly documented facts in this case, what criteria would you propose for evaluating whether a future adjacent-format experiment is more likely to reach sustainable scale than these three were?