Online food order and delivery startup Swiggy is looking to tap a new customer base – students. It is currently experimenting with a handful of educational universities and is working on a business plan that could see its food delivery operations being extended to the university students across the country.
According to an Economic Times report, Swiggy is calling it Launchpad and the company is spreading into university campuses and typically third year (the year before the final year of their 4-year engineering course) students will be appointed as Swiggy CEOs for the campus. If the university is integrated with the local town, then the Swiggy CEO would be for the town. Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Hyderabad, Lovely Professional University and Chitkara University both in Punjab, are the institutions where Swiggy is currently running this programme. And come January, Swiggy’s Launchpad may reach around 400 universities.
These student CEOs will be chaperoned by Swiggy’s executives and they will be trained on how the products and processes are arranged, while the student leaders can bring to the table their own inputs on the local area spread, the kind of tastes that the students and people in the locality would be keen to order and so on.
Explaining the rationale behind this Launchpad move, a Swiggy executive told ET that the towns where universities are located are inter-linked in a way and the restaurants already exist in these towns from where the food is to be picked up. With the overall radius of coverage is quite limited unlike the metropolitan cities, the company’s cost of opening up such new markets is much lower, close to 50%. And making a start within a university campus and then taking it to the towns nearby makes it even more smooth.
Swiggy will work on the different aspects to be addressed in this programme. They will have to pick as Swiggy CEOs, students with that kind of a flair and bent of mind. They will have to take the rules and regulations within the campuses, some of which don’t permit motorized vehicles inside. Cycles may have to be used instead of bikes or scooters.
On the business end, it is also looking at brand tie-ups and roping in payment channels like Google Pay and PhonePe.