After the acquisition music stops, an identity crisis: Foodpanda inside Ola

Is there a large market for a fourth food delivery company in India after Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats. Ola believes there is, and Foodpanda is the answer.

Food delivery company Foodpanda was a pioneer in the space but has now been upstaged by rivals Swiggy and Zomato

After multiple acquisitions, as both acquirer and acquiree, it’s now owned by ride-hailing market leader Ola

With $200M in publicly committed funding and big guns from McKinsey, Foodpanda is struggling to match soaring demand with supply

In addition to execution challenges, Foodpanda needs to arrive at a clear customer value proposition

For a while now, food delivery startup Foodpanda’s Viman Nagar office in Pune has felt more like a fortress than your run-of-the-mill workplace. At its entrance, a group of bouncers stand guard. Their task is simple: keep the company’s delivery executives—yes, its own employees—from entering the building. The measure was taken after protesting delivery personnel stormed Foodpanda’s Mumbai and Pune offices, roughing up the employees who worked there.

The protests were the result of an increasingly familiar phenomenon in the gig-economy—a surplus of ambition and a shortfall of follow through.

AUTHOR

Salman SH

Salman has around four years of experience reporting primarily on consumer internet, startups, and the telecom sector. Previously, he worked with the financial newspaper Mint, reporting on startups and consumer internet trends. Prior to this, he worked with MediaNama and NextBigWhat. At The Ken, Salman will look at startups, technology trends, and the government policies shaping up around them. Loud metal, moshpits, and local gigs are he what he lives for.

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