Swiggy, in a bid to grow the business is weighing its options on adding corporate catering to its portfolio of services. At present, the food delivery platform is reportedly running a pilot service in a couple of corporate parks in Bengaluru, as per an Economic Times report.
The B2B model will involve orders being booked from the companies and passed on to the restaurants or fulfilment kitchens and then the delivery arranged. Right now, as part of the pilot, Swiggy is doing the limited exercise of allowing its app to be used to book the food orders and then monitoring its flow through the restaurants situated within the hubs.
As soon as the order is ready, the employees will get the message and they can proceed to the caeferia and eat their food. This cuts down on the time spent by the employees in standing in queues. Swiggy has given a name to this service Swiggy Cafe and is absolutely free. However, they are just testing the waters and the idea could get developed into a full-fledged model once the learnings from the trial runs are in.
The pilot operation is said to be running for around 3 months and of the two building complexes, one is where Swiggy itself has its offices. With this limited scope the number of orders handled is also only a few hundreds. Rival Zomato has already made a foray into the corporate catering segment by acquiring TongueStun, which has been handling some 150,000 orders a day.
It has however to be understood that this segment may not add too much to the revenues of these companies per se, since employees' lunch or dinner orders may not be typically of high value; they could vary from Rs 50 to Rs 75 per person or per order. But in the long run, it could add more customers from this pool of employees in the different companies being services through this B2B model.
This new effort is in addition to the steps Swiggy is taking in the hyper-local delivery space which can include goods like medicines and groceries.