Gurugram-based food discovery and delivery major Zomato has acquired non-profit organization Feeding India, which works to eradicate hunger, malnutrition and food wastage in India.
Zomato worked closely with Feeding India during the Odisha cyclone crisis. Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal says that this made the company realise that public support can be leveraged to convert it to social good.
By acquiring Feeding India, Zomato says that it wants to la lay a larger focus on serving the underserved and work towards ending hunger and food wastage — not just in India, but globally.
As part of the acquisition the Feeding India team has been completely integrated into Zomato, even though they have been working together out of Zomato’s for about 6 months now.
Post the acquisition, Feeding India will continue to be a non-profit. Zomato will fund the entire salaries of the team – and some core initiatives.
“For example, Zomato will fund the development of the ‘Feedi.ng’ app – this app will connect donors and volunteers at a scale never seen before, and we are hoping that in a few years, it will be the platform to serve at least 100m underprivileged people every month. All the money with Feeding India will remain with Feeding India and be used for their mission “food for everyone” – which we think is a necessary part of our bigger mission “better food for more people,” Deepinder said in a blogpost.
[L-R] Ankit Kawatra, Srishti Jain and Deepinder Goyal
In addition, Zomato is revamping the Feeding India website for make it more transparent and will be publishing quarterly financials on the website. “We are aiming to get the first Feeding Global – Financial Transparency Report, out by October 2019,” Deepinder says.
Zomato says that in December of 2018, Feeding India distributed 78,300 monthly meals to the underprivileged. That figure, it claims, now stands at over 1.1 million meals a month. The number of cities Feeding India is active in too has risen from 65 to 82. The number of Hunger Heroes (volunteers at Feeding India) has grown from 8,500 to 21,500.
“Food for everyone is not something we can solve alone. We need every food organisation to come together and tackle this important issue with our combined resources and knowhow. We are thankful to Accenture, Elanpro, Tupperware, Uber Eats, OYO, Sodexo, and everyone else for being generous partners in this ongoing mission,” Deepinder said.