5/14/2020 Facing up to a Pandemic — A look at Swiggy’s efforts to counter the COVID-19 threat

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Facing up to a Pandemic — A look at Swiggy’s

e orts to counter the COVID-19 threat
Ritwik Moghe
May 8 · 7 min read

Co-Authored with Sunil Rathee and special thanks to Saket Ahuja, Jose Mathew and
Kranthi Mitra

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5/14/2020 Facing up to a Pandemic — A look at Swiggy’s efforts to counter the COVID-19 threat

Introduction

With the onslaught of COVID-19 pandemic, the way we continue life and cater to our
consumers, delivery partners and restaurant partners has taken a drastic shift. The
most pressing concern has been to continuously ensure the safety of these entities in
our ecosystem. We have launched several tech-led initiatives to meet this objective.

These initiatives are geared towards maximizing the safety at each step of the order-
delivery process. A typical order-journey looks as follows:

Before the Order is Placed by the customer

Ensuring that restaurant staff remain healthy

Restaurant partners check the temperatures of their entire staff every day. Anyone with
a temperature above 99.1 F is advised to rest at home. Similarly, any staff member who
feels ill or exhibits symptoms associated with COVID-19 is advised to stay at home until
cleared from a doctor or after testing negative post the mandated quarantine period.

Ensuring high levels of hygiene within the restaurant premises

High levels of hygiene are promoted at restaurants. Restaurants conduct a complete

scrub-down of every possible touchpoint — chairs, tables, doorknobs, countertops and
sinks — every 4 hours. All personnel involved in food preparation are provided 3-ply
face masks. Hand Wash stations are maintained at pickup points to allow delivery
partners to practice safe hand hygiene. All orders are packed in an additional bag, so
that the food container does not come in direct contact with anyone during the transit.

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Restaurants which adhere to all of these guidelines are promoted as having ‘Best Safety
Standards’ on the app.

Sensitizing delivery partners about social distancing

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Sensitizing the delivery partners is especially important as they usually come in close
physical proximity with different individuals, including customers, restaurants and
other delivery partners. Constant communication in form of gifs and videos like the
one below is maintained with all the delivery partners:

Deep Learning Algorithm to ensure that delivery partners wear masks

A Deep-learning-based algorithm was built to ensure that the delivery partners wear
masks on a regular basis. Every delivery partner is required to click a selfie and post it
on their app when they log-in to the system and start receiving orders. The algorithm
checks if the delivery partner is wearing a mask and does not allow partners without
masks to log-in. This tool helps us ensure that our delivery partners follow the required
mask-safety guidelines.

When a delivery partner is assigned to an order

The Swiggy delivery algorithm typically assigns a delivery partner, a few minutes after
the order is placed. This delivery partner then travels to the restaurant, waits until the
food is prepared and then picks up and delivers the order to the customer. This
algorithm has been at the core of what has allowed Swiggy to provide lightning-fast
deliveries to our customers.

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This algorithm, however, requires the delivery partner to wait at the restaurant for a
significant amount of time till the food is prepared. At restaurants with high order
volumes, this could lead to crowding of delivery partners in times of high demand (like
dinner). This might make it difficult to ensure social distancing.

Just in Time delivery partner Arrival

Just in Time (JIT) ensures that the delivery partner assigned to a particular order
arrives at the restaurant right when the food is about to be ready. This reduces the
wait-time and hence the long queues at restaurants.

This is achieved by the use of two machine learning algorithms — an algorithm to

predict the time taken to prepare food for order and an algorithm that predicts the time
taken for a delivery partner to travel to the restaurant. Based on these two predictions,
we pick the right time to assign a delivery partner to order such that he reaches the
restaurant just when the food is ready. JIT assignment leads to about 25% reduction in
average wait time for delivery partners.

Food-Ready — delivery partner Assignment

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As discussed above, the Swiggy assignment algorithm assigns a delivery partner to

each order. For some orders, the delivery partner arrives before the food is ready and
has to wait at the restaurant. For some orders, the partner arrives after the food is
ready. This leads to a scenario where there are some prepared orders at the restaurant
whose assigned delivery partners have not yet arrived, while there are some other
partners waiting at the restaurant whose orders haven’t been prepared yet.

Food-Ready delivery partner Assignment tweaks the assignment algorithm to reduce

these scenarios. Delivery partners are assigned to restaurants instead of specific orders.
As soon as the food is ready for a particular order, it is assigned to a delivery partner
who is already present at the restaurant. Assignment thus happens in a FIFO manner.
This ensures that the wait time of the delivery partner for his order is significantly
reduced.

The following graph captures the impact of this initiative on the crowding of delivery
partners at restaurants. The graph captures the total number of minutes (y-axis) at
different levels of delivery partner-Crowding (x-axis). For instance, this shows that the
number of minutes with 8 delivery partners present at the restaurant was cut to one-
third by Food-Ready Assignment as compared to the standard assignment. Food-Ready
Assignment also leads to lesser instances of a large number of delivery partners waiting
at the restaurant as compared to standard assignment.

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When the order is picked-up

Standard Demarcation Queues

Another initiative that promoted increased physical distance between the delivery
partners was standard demarcation queues at pick-up points. This was a widespread
concept mandated by the government in several regions. Delivery partners were asked
to stand in designated spots or markers while in a queue to pick up the food. Accurate
guidelines on how to create these markers were shared with the restaurants.

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Designated Packers at Stores

Swiggy has been ramping up the supply of groceries over the COVID-19 period.
Grocery orders typically comprise several items which need to be searched and
assembled before being shipped to the customer. A major problem in sending delivery
partners to grocery stores was that they often had to spend a long time at the store
while the items were assembled. To reduce this wait-time, some Swiggy agents are
stationed in stores as packers. These agents start putting the contents of the order
together and then send a notification when the order is packed and ready to be
shipped. A delivery partner is assigned to the order only after this signal comes
through. This drastically cuts down the time the partner has to spend at the store.

When the order is delivered to the customer — Contactless Deliveries

Contactless Deliveries are geared towards maximizing the distance between the
delivery partner and the customer. The delivery partner delivers food outside the
customer’s doorstep and then leaves. The customer gets a notification on the app
saying that their food has been delivered. Fewer the number of customers a delivery
partner interacted with, smaller the chance of him contracting an infection, and
smaller still the chance of him transmitting it to any other customer or restaurant
executive. To ensure that orders are delivered accurately, the delivery partner submits
a picture of the delivery every time he delivers a contactless order.

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In the upcoming articles, we will take a look at various other efforts taken by Swiggy to
improve safety. Efforts like the delivery partner COVID-19 fund and delivery partner-
tipping allow us to ensure that our delivery partners do not suffer financially. AI
algorithms are being used to detect if the delivery partners are complying with mask-
safety standards. Swiggy has also partnered with governmental organizations to
provide large numbers of meals to the destitute.

With these initiatives, Swiggy is trying to soften the blow dealt by coronavirus by
ensuring safety, convenience and comfort. The team is working on many other
initiatives to that end. We will keep you updated about these efforts in the future as
well.

Stay Home. Stay Safe. And when hunger strikes or when you run low on groceries, fire
up that orange app!

Thanks to Madhu Karudeth and Manjunath Chandrashekar.

Data Science Swiggy Food Delivery Covid 19 Swiggy Data Science

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