Restaurants oppose Zomato's 'draconian' food quality policy

Budget restaurants and small cloud kitchens may be hit the hardest; NRAI to highlight concerns in a letter to Zomato management

Restaurants say that Zomato’s new food quality policy, which is slated to come into effect on April 18 and can lead to their ban on the aggregator platform based on customer complaints, is one-sided and will hurt them.

Zomato has sent an e-mail to restaurant partners saying that food quality complaints might lead to a temporary disablement of a restaurant on its platform upon its investigation. The disablement will continue till a restaurant conducts a third-party inspection that is FSSAI-approved. The entire cost of the audit would be borne by the restaurant.

“While the intent of the policy is good, the way Zomato is trying to implement it is a matter of concern. It could turn out to be a draconian move for budget restaurants and small cloud kitchens on the platform will give their life, blood and sweat to their business,” said Pranav Rungta, head of the Mumbai chapter of National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI).

“How will Zomato really ascertain if the complaint is genuine through a customer support executive sitting in a call centre and looking at a photo of the food shared by the consumer?”, he asked.

Meanwhile, the NRAI is drafting a letter highlighting its concerns that will be sent to Zomato by Saturday. NRAI President Kabir Suri has had a call with Zomato co-founder Mohit Gupta already and they will be meeting next week to make an effort to resolve the issue that takes into account the concerns of all stakeholders.

“We can take the responsibility of the food till it leaves the restaurants. After that a mix up may happen at the delivery executives’ end or even after it reaches a customer,” added Rungta.

According to QSR brand Samosa Party, there have also been instances in the industry when a competitor tried to deliberately sabotage a restaurant by posting about quality issues on social media or cooking up fake reviews.

“It is our mission to convince people that the belief that dirty is tasty is wrong, especially in the savouries segment we play in. One does not have to come at the cost of the other,” said Diksha Pande, co-founder of Samosa Party.

“On the other hand, Zomato’s new policy seems to be very unilateral where one side of the story is given more importance than the other. It is not right to penalise restaurants when the fault is not theirs most of the time,” she added.

Zomato said in its e-mail to restaurants that a few examples of a severe food quality issue are presence of hazardous foreign objects in the food like insects and sharp objects like glass, serving pre-packaged food, non-vegetarian food instead of vegetarian, wrong type of meat and rotten food.

“Such a policy will hurt the small pocket-friendly restaurants the most like us for example. Our customer base such as students have a tendency to raise complaints to avail of refunds. But, it might not be much of a problem for high end restaurants which have average order values of Rs 2,000 plus,” said Rajat Jaiswal, co-founder of Wat-a-Burger.

“Around 70 per cent of customer complaints turn out to be fake on the aggregator platforms. If restaurants are penalised, why not penalise a customer who registers a fake complaint? If restaurants are banned from taking orders, then customer IDs whose complaints turn out to be fake should also be banned from ordering,” he said.