Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It’s Aayush here for Trade Tricks this week. Remember that article last month by Twitter user @prstb on their newsletter Pea Bee? The one about how a single food business operator with two tiny kitchens was operating nearly 400 different restaurant listings on Swiggy and Zomato? (If you don’t, check it out here.)

The post caused a bit of a public uproar, and for good reason. 

I mean, sure, it’s a neat deal for the operator—more brands->more visibility->more orders. All with no increase in infrastructure, staff, or packaging costs. And legally, too. Because once a kitchen is granted a licence number by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), there is no cap on the number of brands it can operate. 

But the consumer? All they get is the illusion of choice. And considering how many such brands had very similar names to popular operations (like Box A8 🙄 instead of Box8), the opportunity to get conned. 

How could foodtech platforms be gamed so easily? Why wouldn’t they do something about this? After all, to the customer, all these listings seem like different places. So, even if they had had a bad experience with one brand and wouldn’t want to order from the same operator again, there was a very real chance that they could end up doing just that. 

Well, at least one of India’s two largest foodtech platforms seems to have woken up to the problem. And working with the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) and other restaurant partners, it has come up with a solution. 

Let’s dive in.

Zomato’s fix for the multi-brand-kitchen loophole

On Friday, Zomato co-founder Mohit Gupta wrote a detailed blog post titled: Our take on multiple brands from the same kitchen

It didn’t touch upon how/why such operations had been allowed to proliferate on the platform. But it didn’t mince words on what Zomato’s stand was. These brands, which accounted for less than 0.2% of registered kitchens, Gupta wrote, “confuse/cheat customers by creating a false perception of choice.” 

They were also terrible for customer experience. Here’s a chart from the blog: 

Interesting numbers. 

But more important is what came next: a solution, with two parts; fashioned in consultation with the NRAI. 

First, operations that run more than 10 brands out of a single location will be manually verified.