Context: Zomato announced ‘Zomato Instant’ yesterday. 10-minute food delivery! And people have gone on a tizzy foisting many questions about it. The most common one seems to be, ‘But how…?’. Here’s how. (I have added the ‘Why?’ and ‘What about…’ at the end of this post).
Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened the first McDonald’s in San Bernardino, California on May 15, 1940. At that time, they had an exhaustive 25-item menu that included peanut butter and jelly with French fries!
Soon, the brothers did some data crunching of the sales and realized that almost all the profits were from only one item – burgers! So they remodeled their kitchen to suit the sales and profitability reality, with just 3 items – burgers, fries, and drinks.
The creativity demonstrated by the McDonald brothers was not in adding things to the menu but in knowing what to remove from it. They were just using the Pareto Principle, of course – roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.
Today, when you stand at a McDonald’s ordering counter and gaze at the menu, you still notice a fairly limited menu, but one where you can mix and match the items to create your own combos. And people still seem indecisive even with such a limited menu at such fast-food/quick-serve restaurants. It even became a famous meme in 2009.
This is something that the brand famously made use of in their new campaign launched during the Super Bowl in 2022 🙂
Another related context is the concept of triage in medical care systems that originated during the days of Napoleon. Triage is a French word that means ‘sort’. People responsible for the removal of the wounded soldiers from the battlefield would divide the victims into three categories:
- Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive
- Those who are unlikely to live, regardless of what care they receive
- Those for whom immediate care may make a positive difference
We use this basic idea in our day-to-day lives too, to prioritize what work we should focus on. There could be, broadly,
- Work that we should do right away because there’s a deadline in the next 30 minutes
- Work that can be thought of in the background and performed after the immediate work
- Work that you do not need to think of right now at all since the deadline is the next day
Now imagine a restaurant, not unlike McDonald’s, that decides to focus only on the first layer of this triage! That they’d make/deliver only that which is extremely urgent, and they do the preselecting of the items that they can deliver urgently.
That’s precisely what the entire 10-minute delivery is all about that Zomato has now extended to food delivery too.
And to think I wrote this on February 3, 2022:
If you extrapolate this trend of reducing the inventory from a larger set of possibilities and bringing it closer to people, what could be next? It has to be something that people want frequently, not occasionally.
Food, perhaps? Not any food (which is being solved by Swiggy or Zomato anyway), but comfort food, perhaps? Something that is not ‘outside food’ (with all the extra masala and pomp associated with non-home cooked food), but something that we’re too lazy to make but yet is very simple. Say, a limited range of comfort food – idlis, rotis, dosa, etc. in 10 minutes? I don’t know – just guessing aloud 🙂
If you see McDonald’s history and the way they prioritize fast-moving items as the mainstay of the menu, they simply plan their backend systems to enable the delivery of those items. That’s precisely what a Zomato would do too – plan their internal systems at each delivery station to suit the limited number of items on the menu that people could choose from.
When people imagine ‘food delivery’, they presume anything and everything as the menu and then wonder how Zomato would deliver anything in 10 minutes. But as David Ogilvy famously said, ‘The essence of strategy is sacrifice’. If the menu itself is sacrificed to showcase only that which Zomato can deliver in 10 minutes, this task is perfectly possible.
Like the other quick-delivery grocery brands, Zomato would have a second layer incorporated besides a selective menu – selective locations. Only those locations that have a Zomato delivery station in the immediate radius would promise this 10-minute service.
But in terms of perception, the broader outlook is that ‘Zomato delivers in 10 minutes’.
Zomato also mentions ‘sophisticated dish-level demand prediction algorithms’ in Deepinder’s blog post introducing this new service. This is the ‘McDonalds brothers figuring out that 80% of their sales come from burgers’ part. To understand a larger trend in terms of demand, and to match it with what they can feasibly produce very fast (within a minute or two) so that the 10-minute delivery can be enabled. If, for instance, paneer butter masala is one such dish, it is something that can be made first thing in the morning (freshly) and stored in adequate quantities (based on the prediction algorithm). It could then be reheated in a limited quantity instantly when there’s an order and delivered. Sure, but what if the customer wants butter naan along with it?
For that, observe the other mention in Zomato’s post: ‘future-ready in-station robotics’.
There is considerable movement in this direction!
So, a fully/partially automated food station equipped with robots that can promise 10-minute delivery of a limited item menu is not inconceivable at all. The only thing you need to remember is that ‘food delivery in 10 minutes’ does not mean ‘any food’ delivered in 10 minutes and contort yourself with ‘will it be freshly cooked?’, ‘can they make and deliver a masala dosa?’ among other existential questions. If a robot is taught how to make a burger, it can be taught how to make masala dosa too, if Zomato wants to add it to the menu.
The other questions are beyond the purview of ‘how can they…?’:
- if robots start cooking food, what would happen to the people who are being displaced? This is, ‘If they start this, what would happen…?’ question. Much larger in scope and impact.
- hand-made food is the best; machine-made food is artificial, right? Like a person playing an instrument vs. a computer generating that sound. This is poking a hole in the subjective quality of the food being made/delivered. This would differ from person to person.
- do we really need 10-minute food delivery? Only medicines are needed in 10 minutes, everything else can wait, no? This is a more philosophical and existential question 🙂 Again, would differ from person to person.