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Foodtech blues

Foodtech and the delivery personnel dilemma

Indian foodtech companies are looking to corner the market. But to do so, they need to scale their fleets. There are tens of thousands of jobs on offer, but delivery personnel aren’t coming cheap

11/09/18

Salman SH

Food delivery startups such as Swiggy and Zomato are scaling their delivery fleets to meet growing demand

Currently there are more than 185,000 delivery personnel on the road, with vacancies for another 100,000

But attrition among delivery personnel is high. Can a delivery company achieve scalable growth with such high attrition?

For now, these companies are throwing money at delivery personnel to keep them loyal. But is it sustainable?

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“Are they even making money?” This was the question posed by 19-year-old Roshan*, a delivery personnel on the payrolls of UberEats, Uber’s food delivery arm. We’d been discussing his employment with UberEats, and the more I explained the company’s business model to him, the more worried he seemed. Roshan is a college student, with little…

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