Why the NRAI wants to cut out the middleman of aggregator platforms like Swiggy and Zomato

At a recent townhall webinar, The National Restaurant Association of India discussed the need for restaurants to reprioritise direct delivery

National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), a voice of the Indian restaurant industry, in their Townhall 4.0 recently discussed the importance of ‘direct order and the way to get your business future-ready’. At the townhall, held virtually, prominent chefs and restaurant owners discussed the importance and challenges of enabling customers to order food directly from restaurants, instead of being solely dependent on aggregator apps like Swiggy and Zomato. Though the multiple lockdowns to check the spread of COVID-19, since March 2020, many restaurants have survived purely on deliveries, all the while paying a large chunk of their profits to food aggregators. Aggregators take a large percentage of the restaurants’ delivery revenues (as much as 30 - 40 %, by some restaurateurs’ estimates) and are unwilling to share customer-related data (like identity of the customer and where the order came from) with restaurants, observed the panellists.