Zomato Acquires Bengaluru Startup TongueStun to Tap Into the Corporate Cafeteria Sector

Food-ordering app Zomato has announced that it has acquired TongueStun, a Bengaluru-based startup. TongueStun is the leader in the corporate cafeteria sector, and currently has its footprints in six cities - Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, and Gurgaon/Noida. The startup has a large pool of clientele, including IBM, Accenture, Ernst & Young, Sony, Genpact, 3M, Mindtree and Deloitte. Zomato claims that with this acquisition, it aims to provide its users with an important use case - to order food for pickup from their cafeterias using the Zomato app.

TongueStun was founded in 2012, and now caters to as many as 1,500 companies and provides 1,50,000 meals daily to office-goers through its 1,000-plus food partners. Zomato says that it has been in talks with TongueStun for quite some time.

Zomato notes that all of TongueStun's customers, all contracts stay intact, and the company's business will go on as usual. "Everything will run as smoothly as it previously did. With more execution muscle, we are only going to provide TongueStun's users more delight and better food choices. Our increased speed of growth will benefit our food partners - caterers and restaurants tremendously. The team will stay intact as 100 percent of the team at TongueStun is being retained in their original roles," the company explains in a blog post. The company also confirms that TongueStun founder Manjunath Ramakrishnan is now a part of the Zomato core team.

Last year, Zomato acquired food delivery service Runnr, adding over 1,500 people to its kitty. Runnr was originally known as Roadrunnr, and offered B2B services for hyperlocal deliveries - this grew slowly, and last year, Roadrunnr acquired troubled food delivery service TinyOwl, and changed its name to Runnr, through which you could order food and track delivery, much like with Swiggy, which is Zomato's biggest competition in the Indian market currently. This acquisition of TongueStun could give Zomato an edge over Swiggy, as delivering food from the cafeteria to the office space above is a service that has not been tapped into so far.