Flipkart, the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce titan, is preparing to take on the country’s entrenched food-delivery duopoly, stepping into a fiercely contested battleground that has previously repelled high-profile global giants like Amazon and Google.
The Bengaluru-headquartered e-commerce giant is currently testing its food-delivery service internally. According to people familiar with the matter, the trial has rapidly scaled from a few initial hundred employees to upwards of 8,000 corporate and warehouse staff. To support the upcoming public rollout, Flipkart has deployed a dedicated fleet of delivery riders through its logistics arm, Ekart. These personnel operate separately from the riders who handle the company’s rapid grocery and goods fulfillment, known as quick-commerce deliveries.
For participating employees, the food-delivery option currently appears as a distinct, dedicated tab directly on Flipkart’s main shopping application, sitting comfortably alongside its "Minutes" quick-commerce offering and travel-booking services. Restaurant listings on the platform are being pulled from a dual source: eateries integrated via ONDC, the government-backed open network designed to seamlessly connect online buyers and sellers across competing digital platforms, alongside restaurants that Flipkart has signed up through direct partnerships.
On the streets of Bengaluru, the southern technology hub where Flipkart is headquartered, citizens have already begun spotting riders wearing distinctive jerseys bearing the branding "Eat-in by Minutes," actively fulfilling live test orders.
This strategic push places Flipkart squarely inside a rapidly expanding industry. According to estimates from brokerage firm Bernstein, India’s food-delivery market is expanding at an impressive clip of 18% to 20% annually. Despite this robust growth, online food delivery still accounts for just over 15% of India’s broader food-services sector. Market incumbents Zomato—owned by parent company Eternal—and Swiggy collectively serve an estimated 85 million to 95 million paying customers every year, according to Bernstein’s market data. This sheer dominance highlights both the immense stronghold the two platforms maintain and the substantial room for new entrants to expand online food ordering across the world’s most populous nation, which boasts well over a billion active internet subscriptions.
Flipkart, however, is not the sole contender attempting to disrupt the established order. Ride-hailing firm Rapido, which has previously mounted formidable challenges against Uber and its Indian competitor Ola, has begun testing its own food-delivery service dubbed "Ownly," which notably promises a zero-commission model for restaurants. Concurrently, market heavyweight Swiggy has rolled out a separate application called Toing, specifically targeted at budget-conscious consumers seeking affordable meal options. Both moves highlight mounting pressure across the entire industry against traditional pricing frameworks and the steep commissions currently levied on restaurants.
Sagar Daryani, president of the New Delhi-headquartered National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI)—an organization representing more than 500,000 restaurants nationwide—did not mince words regarding the current landscape. "Monopoly is bad, but duopoly is more pathetic," Daryani said, noting that whatever one platform initiates, the other inevitably follows suit. He argued that the nation’s restaurant community has long sought viable alternatives to the two dominant platforms to regain control over their profit margins.
While Flipkart is breaking new ground for its own brand, it is certainly not the first deep-pocketed enterprise to test the waters of India’s food-delivery sector. Back in 2020, global e-commerce titan Amazon launched its own food-ordering service in Bengaluru, only to shutter the division two years later after struggling to capture meaningful market share. Similarly, Google’s Areo app—which attempted to bundle food ordering alongside various home services—failed to gain traction with Indian consumers. Meanwhile, ride-hailing giant Uber completely exited the local market in March 2020 by selling its entire Uber Eats operations in India to Zomato for $206 million.
Industry observers, however, point to a fundamental operational difference between Flipkart and those that attempted the venture before it. Zomato and Swiggy initially built their core business models entirely around delivering restaurant meals before eventually branching outward into quick commerce. Flipkart is executing the exact reverse strategy, utilizing its already established e-commerce infrastructure and expanding quick-commerce network as a solid springboard into the culinary delivery space.
"Flipkart’s quick commerce benefit will get passed on to food delivery, so it will be leaner, more efficient," Daryani noted, emphasizing the structural advantages of leveraging existing logistics frameworks.
For the restaurant community, the entry of new competitors brings renewed optimism regarding the high cost of selling meals online. Daryani, who also serves as the co-founder and CEO of popular dumpling chain Wow! Momo Foods, revealed that Flipkart has pitched a base commission structure of approximately 10%. This figure stands in stark contrast to the hefty 20% to 25% commission rates typically demanded by Zomato and Swiggy.
Commissions, however, represent only a fraction of the total operational expense for restaurants operating online. Once mandatory advertising expenditures, platform discounts, and other promotional costs are factored into the equation, dining establishments can find themselves spending up to 40% to 50% of an individual order’s total value on established platforms. Daryani stated he expects Flipkart’s cumulative merchant cost to hover closer to 15% or 16%, a change that could allow restaurants to retain a significantly larger portion of revenue from every single transaction.
Yet, securing restaurant partnerships is only part of the equation; winning over price-conscious consumers is an entirely separate challenge. Bernstein analysts estimate that new market entrants might only be able to save consumers roughly 20 to 30 Indian rupees—equivalent to roughly 20 to 30 cents—per order by running leaner operations. Industry experts question whether such minor savings will prove sufficient to pull loyal users away from Zomato and Swiggy, particularly given that the incumbents possess the financial muscle to deploy deeper promotional discounts to defend their turf.
Despite these hurdles, Flipkart has no intention of keeping its tests confined to its headquarters for long. The company has informed restaurant partners that it intends to launch the food-delivery service publicly by the end of October, with plans to rapidly scale operations across five or six major Indian cities before the close of the year.
This strategic food-delivery push arrives at a time when Flipkart’s long-awaited initial public offering remains shrouded in uncertainty. Chief Executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy recently declined to commit to a definitive timetable for an IPO, even as the firm aggressively expands into auxiliary business segments designed to increase user engagement and drive frequent traffic back to its core application.
The broader competitive backdrop in India’s digital commerce market is growing increasingly tense. Quick-commerce platforms that initially built their reputations on delivering household groceries in mere minutes have steadily expanded their catalogs to include high-end discretionary goods, including the latest Apple iPhones. This evolution places them in direct, head-to-head competition with traditional e-commerce mainstays like Flipkart and Amazon.
Flipkart did not respond to requests for comment regarding its upcoming food-delivery launch.