Fried and tested: Zomato takes the lead in drive for clean auto fuel

Food aggregator collecting used cooking oil from eateries to be processed into bio-diesel

For Kala Ram, a 48-year-old truck driver from Rajasthan, food, water and diesel have been the three basic necessities of his life on the road for over two decades. But the diesel he uses has undergone quite a change in recent months. 

“Mileage thoda kam hai, pick up jada hai……. Magar log bolte hai yeh sabse shuddh hai (the mileage is a tad lower, pick up is more… but people say this is the purest),” a candid Ram said, standing by a refilling dispenser of BioD Energy, a leading bio-diesel manufacturer, at Bawal in Haryana.

Ram’s fleet owner began to run his trucks and tankers on bio-diesel from last August. However, Ram was unaware that the new fuel was derived from used cooking oil (UCO) collected by food-delivery aggregator Zomato from food outlets and kitchens in the Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR). 

About 70 km from Bawal, in the main kitchen of Om Sweets, the air is heavy with the aroma of deep-fried sweets, snacks and namkeens. But you needn’t worry if the oil is being reused again and again to fry the sweets and savouries. The UCO at Om Sweets goes to the BioD Energy plant in Bawal for processing. And it’s Zomato that collects and carries it. When the Zomato pick-up van arrives,  the staff take out the empty containers, load the van with barcoded containers already filled with UCO, and feed the data into their mobiles. Some 26 containers, of 30 kg each, are barcoded with details such as weight, quality, impurities, and loaded into the van.

“Earlier, we used to supply the UCO to local vendors. The advantage of the Zomato tie-up is its traceability,” said Rajnish Puri, general manager (operations), Om Sweets, which entered into a tie-up with Zomato last October. Puri shows a customised mobile app that displays all the details of every kilogram of the used oil (UCO is weighed in kilograms because of its density and impurity content) and tracks its journey up to the bio-diesel plant. 

For many eateries, this rules out the possibility of the used oil being put into cooking again. Reuse of cooking oil has health hazards that can lead to diseases like obesity, heart problems, cancer and diabetes.

On an average, Om Sweets uses120 litres of various types of cooking oil daily. This includes palm oil, desi ghee, sunflower, refined and soya oil. 

“Every two hours, we do a quality check and use fresh oil based on that. The UCO that we supply to Zomato comes to around 450 kg a week,” revealed Dinesh Yadav, manager of the kitchen.  

The Zomato warehouse facility at Samalkha in Haryana is 30 minutes’ drive away from the Om Sweets kitchen. Delivery associate Shivam Kumar only follows the routes specified in the mobile app and enters the data at the time of pick-up and unloading. “I collect oil from 15-17 places daily,” Kumar said. One major constraint in their operations is the time restrictions on the entry of such vehicles in NCR.

In its avatar as a used-oil aggregator, Zomato is covering over 1,000 eateries across Delhi-NCR. These include standalone restaurants, small hotels and eatery chains like Biryani By Kilo, Yum Yum Cha, Mithaas and Berco’s. The company pays between Rs 15 and Rs 32 a kg for the used oil.

Zomato does some basic filtration of the UCO at its Samalkha warehouse. With a staff of just 10 people, it handles about 130-150 tonne of UCO a month, which may be raised to around 1000 tonne by March 2020. Ritesh Khera, vice-president (sustainability), Zomato, says that oil is one major reason behind the poor quality of food available in India and that the company is addressing this concern by becoming a UCO aggregator. There is some money to be made, too. Zomato sells the UCO to BioD at a small margin.

According to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), most of the UCO in major restaurants and kitchens are bought by small vendors and resold to street vendors. Hence, experts feel that the entry of an organised player like Zomato will infuse more efficiency and professionalism in kitchen waste management in the hospitality sector.

“Our job is to ensure that every drop that we pick up lands in a bio-diesel plant. At the back-end, we know the dates and the pickup spots. The rest is all automated,” Khera said. Zomato plans to take this part of its business pan-India. 

It is said to be in talks with Bengaluru-based EcoGreen Fuels and Mumbai-based Unicorn. Zomato will also launch this service in five more places in India.

At Samalkha, the staff check the barcode of every empty container before it is loaded. And they scan the barcodes on filled containers before the filtration process starts. The UCO goes through three layers of filtration to get rid of suspended particles, water and free fatty acids (FFA). 

“We monitor density, sediments, moisture and iodine value before moving the UCO to large raw-material storage tanks,” said Indrapal Singh, who works at the laboratory at BioD Energy.   

At Bio-D’s Rs 100-crore plant in Bawal, the UCO goes through a four-step process, including segregation of impurities like FFAs, splitting of by-products like glycerine and pitch and distillation. “Distilled biodiesel (B100) can be used as a 100 per cent replacement in any vehicle without any engine change,” said Shiva Vig, director, BioD Energy. Unblended bio-fuel is sold in retail outlets in Rajasthan which gives the consumers a price advantage of Rs 2-3 a litre.  

Oil marketing companies procure non-distilled biodiesel at an assured rate of Rs 51 a litre. Five per cent of the non-distilled bio-diesel is blended with conventional diesel in accordance with the government norms. For end-user companies, this blend gives a price advantage of over Rs 10 a litre as the fuel attracts only 12 per cent GST.

Little wonder that BioD wants to diversify into retail by January 2020. On the cards are as many as 10 outlets, which will not only give customers a price advantage, but also the satisfaction of using a sustainable fuel.