Zomato Responds to Viral Video Showing Its Delivery Executive Eating Food, Tampering With Orders

While food ordering platform Zomato is on a spree of expanding its market presence, a video has emerged that shows one of its delivery executives consuming food out of the boxed orders that could seriously dent its image. The over two-minute viral video has been received with a lot of outrage from the public as it shows the delivery executive not just having food out of boxed orders but then resealing them and putting back into the delivery bag, likely on the way of delivering them to customers. Zomato has formally acknowledged the flaw as a "human error in judgment" and assured the adoption of certain upgrades in the system, including the use of tamper-proof tapes and other precautionary measures, to ensure safe delivery of food items.

The video, as shared by a Twitter user, shows a delivery executive in a Zomato t-shirt eating food out of multiple boxed orders, opening each box, helping himself to a couple of spoons, and resealing them and placing them back into his delivery bag. At the time of filing this story, the video received over 151,000 views and also shared separately via social media platforms. The video was also being widely circulate via WhatsApp.

Zomato has confirmed in a blog post that it has found that the video was shot in Madurai and the person in the video in question happened to be a delivery partner on its fleet. "We have spoken to him at length — and while we understand that this was a human error in judgment, we have taken him off our platform," the company says.

"We take this very seriously and will soon introduce tamper-proof tapes, and other precautionary measures to ensure we add an extra layer of safeguard against such behaviour. Additionally, we will educate our delivery fleet of over 1.5 lakh partners to highlight or escalate any such deviations to us, while also encouraging our users — the custodians of our platform — to highlight the smallest of anomalies to us," it adds.

Zomato also underlines that it maintains a zero tolerance policy for tampering of food and the case highlighted by the video makes its commitment to fleet training, scheduling, and process "even stronger".

In October, Zomato raised $210 million (roughly Rs. 1,151 crores) from Alibaba's online payment platform Alipay Singapore. That funding came weeks after the company acquired Bengaluru-based TongueStun, which serves corporate catering space in six Indian cities, including Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, and Gurugram/ Noida.

Late last month, the company also expanded its presence and brought its online ordering and food delivery services to 30 additional Indian cities. It also last week bought Lucknow-based TechEagle to start exploring a food delivery model via drones in India.