A Project Report

on
“Zomato and Foodpanda”

For the subject Principles of Management in the Masters of Business Administration

programme at GLS University.

Submitted to:
Faculty of Management
Submitted by:
Ashika Sudarshan -202000620010366
Darshini Barot -202000620010726
Henal Mehta -202000620010749
Sakshi Shah -202000620010781
Saransh Nagori -202000620010332
Tannu Patwari -202000620010764

Batch: 2020-22
Sem-1
 PARTICULARS

ZOMATO AND FOODPANDA

I PREFACE
II ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
III TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter-1 Introduction of companies
Chapter-2 Details of Zomato
Chapter-3 Details of Foodpanda
Chapter-4 Reasons for success of Zomato and failure of Foodpanda with
respect to the functions of management
Chapter-5 Suggestions
Chapter-6 CSR activities undertaken by Zomato and Foodpanda
Chapter-7 Findings and Learnings
IV Conclusion
V References
 PREFACE

As a part of MBA Programme and in order to gain practical knowledge in the field of
management, we are required to make a project report on “Zomato and Foodpanda.”
This project is divided into two parts; the first part describes how Zomato used the
functions of management effectively for its success and the second part describes how
Foodpanda despite being a big brand failed to use these functions of management
appropriately which led to their ineffective performance in the market.
Working on this project helped us in learning about the functioning of the organization.
We learnt how different functions of management like planning, organizing, staffing,
directing and controlling affects the success and failure of an organization.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

On the very outset of this report, we would like to extend our sincere and heartfelt
gratitude towards all the personages who have helped us in this endeavor. Without their
active guidance, help, cooperation and encouragement we would not have made headway
in the project.

We are obliged to GLS University. The institute has given us an opportunity to get
practical knowledge in the field of management and also for helping us to undergo this
inspiring project. The learning during this project has been a great experience.

We are privileged to pay our sincere gratitude towards Professor Dhairya Jhala for
providing valuable guidance and encouragement throughout the project for keeping our
morale up and making it possible to complete and submit this report on time. We are
equally grateful to all the other teachers for their complete support.

We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to all those who have knowingly or
unknowingly contributed for the successful completion of our project.
 CHAPTER - 1

INTRODUCTION

ZOMATO:
Zomato is an online restaurant guide and food ordering platform that allows users to order meals from
restaurant and have them delivered. The company was founded in the year 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and
Pankaj Chaddah. The app provides detailed information about restaurants which helps customers to
discover, rate and review restaurants as well as create their own network of foodies for trusted
recommendations. Zomato connects over 55 million users to restaurants in 24 countries. The company
has registered 11 trademarks with them.

They use 38 technology products and services including HTML 5, Google Analytics and jQuery
according to G2 Stack. They are also actively using 51 technologies for its website these include
LetsEncrypt, Wordpress and Wordpress Plungins.

Zomato has raised a total of $1.9B in funding over 19 rounds. They have made 3 investments and an exit.
They have also acquired 14 organizations; their most recent acquisition was FITSO on Jan 20,2021.

Zomato is ranked 1604 among websites globally based on its 32,651,112 monthly web visitors.

FOODPANDA:
Foodpanda is a global online food delivery system that enables the customers to place orders from local
restaurants by using their website or app. The company was launched by Ralf Wenzel and Benjamin
Bauer in 2012 and is operated from Berlin, Germany with its presence across 40 countries and 500 cities.
It is called foodpanda in Asia and Europe and hellofood in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
Customers enter their postal code on the website or app; search for food from various restaurants and
place their order. Foodpanda processes their order and sends an SMS to them in order to confirm their
order and let them know about the estimated delivery time. They further pass on the details to the
restaurants and then they finally deliver the food to customers.

They use 23 technology products and services including HTML5, Google Analytics and jQuery according
to G2 Stack. They are also actively using 17 technologies for its website these include Mobile Non
Scaleable Content, Facebook Sharer and Facebook Domain Insights.

Foodpanda has raised a total of $749.5M in funding over 8 rounds. They have made an investment and an
exit. They have also acquired 13 organisations; their most recent acquisition was Holachef on Oct
16,2018.

Foodpanda is ranked 139,898 among websites globally based on its 267,166 monthly web visitors. They
have around 709,075 monthly app downloads.
 CHAPTER-2

DETAILS OF ZOMATO

Zomato has carved a unique and profitable business model for itself right from the very beginning which
helped them to sail through even when the times were tough including the period of 2015-16, when the
company was experiencing significant losses. Zomato was fortunate from the time it had laid its
foundation as it continued to attract great attention from a series of interesting investors who invested
large amount of money and aided in the expansion and growth of the company. It was mainly the idea and
the unique business model in which many people saw potential.

Zomato has received investments worth millions through various rounds of funding. Their top investors
include Ant Financial, Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings and Info Edge. They have managed to acquire
various companies over the years; with the most notable thing being the acquisition of US based
Urbanspoon in 2015. Other acquisitions made by Zomato include Obedovat, Menu Mania, Lunchtime,
Maple Graph, Sparse Labs, Gastronausi, NexTable, Cibando, Mekanist and Runnr.
 CHAPTER-3

DETAILS OF FOODPANDA

The details of foodpanda comes at a point when there is a lot of scope for gaining market share. It is just
like the chicken and egg problem; if there aren’t enough restaurants than the customers won’t come, and
if there aren’t enough customers than the restaurants won’t tie up with the food delivering services. In the
last decade more than 20 food delivering startups have popped up in several cities of India like Mumbai,
Gurgaon, Pune, Bangalore etc. Majority of them failed to survive cut-throat competition while companies
like Swiggy and Zomato continues to gain market share.

At the beginning of the decade Foodpanda was founded across the Asia Pacific and South East Asia
covering Europe, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Philippines. But by the middle of the decade foodpanda
had lost its image in the global market. In 2014 it sold its Delivery Club business to Russia for $100
million and in the same year the German Delivery Hero acquired the Foodpanda group. In 2017,
Foodpanda was acquired by Ola in an all-share deal. Since then, the business of the company has
grounded: Ola fired hundreds of employees from Foodpanda indicating at an imminent financial crisis.
 CHAPTER-4

REASONS FOR SUCCESS OF ZOMATO AND FAILURE OF

FOODPANDA WITH RESPECT TO THE FUNCTIONS OF
MANAGEMENT

REASONS FOR SUCCESS OF ZOMATO

Planning: One of the key reasons for the success of Zomato is its marketing strategy and in-depth
knowledge of its competitors. They always focused on customer preferences and tried to offer something
new such as Zomato Gold for all the dine out lovers. They have partnered with 10000 restaurants globally
in order to provide variety to the customers. They even provide the customers with 1+1 on food or 2+2 on
beverage offer in order to attract them. They use direct marketing strategies like SMS and direct mails;
this helped in increasing their reach and customer base. Zomato also organizes various events and food-
based festivals by collaborating and partnering with multiple restaurants across the world.

Organising: Zomato makes the food ordering process effective by providing online delivery of food
services. It is based on the simple idea of providing scanned menus to customers along with contact
number of restaurants to make the process of ordering trouble-free for them. They have separate teams for
advertising who sell the website to the restaurant owners and attracts them to advertise with Zomato; they
earn maximum through the local restaurants.

They provide easy search facilities for local restaurants and cafe through one of its major segments. It
connects more and more people towards food and also makes it easier for restaurants in enabling a viable
ecosystem. It has also organized a 24/7 chat system for any kind of difficulties and for any support
required. It has launched an initiative “Hyperpure” in its business in which special importance is given on
quality improvement of ingredients used by restaurants and to offer clean and fresh ingredients to its
partner restaurants. They have even formulated various revenue generating strategies like organizing
events, advertising of restaurants, sale of tickets in events etc.

Directing: Zomato is itself best in its business because it works as a restaurant guide or food directory
that offers genuine and correct information and reviews about cafes and restaurants, thus helps customers
to decide and spend wisely. They motivate people well to fit well in terms of skill, culture and attitude. It
guides the team that the information should be relevant and comprehensive for the customers to try the
food again. They bring together all the best and talented minds and direct them to set up a creative work
environment and provide innovative ideas, thus leading the company towards rapid growth.
Controlling: One of the major reasons for the success of Zomato is its ability to deal with problems. Two
years ago, there was no problem of spam control but now owners are trying to plant fake reviews. In order
to control this problem filters are used and behavioural patterns are being observed by Zomato. They are
even trying to build a dish database and for that purpose they are trying to create an intelligent OCR
system. In this if you are looking for a particular dish you would get all possible alternatives of various
restaurants. They tried to solve the hiring problems with the help of an experiment; the experiment had
two programs – trial week for tech and leadership program for leaders. This experiment was done in order
to hire the best employees because proper staffing is what determines the success of any organization.
REASONS FOR FAILURE OF FOODPANDA

Planning: One of the major reasons for the failure of foodpanda was improper planning due to which
even after leading and having very less competition; they failed to maintain their position after sometime.
They did not make new strategies according to the requirement of the changing market. They focused on
launching the app and promoting it through commercials but failed to cater to the real problems like
resolving their internal conflicts. There was lack of proper management in the company. They did not
have a plan to deal with the threats and opportunities they might come across in future.

Organising: There was lack of proper communication system between the customer, restaurants and
foodpanda. They often failed to communicate with the customers and restaurants; many times the
customers would call the restaurants directly to enquire about the delayed delivery but the restaurants
were not informed about their order placed on the app. They did not communicate about the cancelled
orders; their improper actions and miscommunications pulled the business down to the ground. The
company’s ownership was blurred due to which there was no proper classification of authorities.

Directing: In foodpanda proper directing was missing there were many loopholes like the company did
not follow up with either the customers or the restaurants. When a customer selected a restaurant from
their site it was rather a transaction between the customer and the restaurants and foodpanda had no value
about the order. In this way several customers and restaurants exploited the company and contributed to
the failure. The number of fake restaurants on foodpanda was close to 400, the company on- boarded the
restaurants without verification and that lead to many problems which were not solved due to improper
directing.

Controlling: Due to improper planning the technique of company to deal with problems was not
appropriate. The laid-back attitude of management to deal with the problems lead to the failure of the
company. They were not able to measure the actual performance of the company due to improper
planning process. There were no follow ups done in the company in order to avoid mistakes of the past
and make changes for the future. They were not dynamic enough to cope with the new technology, trends,
culture etc.
 CHAPTER-5

SUGGESTIONS

Suggestions for Foodpanda:

Foodpanda should reframe their futuristic goals and planning and make strategies accordingly to sustain
in the market for a long period of time.
They should improve their app so that the loopholes are covered up so that customers and restaurants
can't exploit foodpanda and they can know have proper sight on the working of the business.
They should improve their communication system so that it becomes easy for the customers and
restaurants to communicate respectively.
They should take proper feedback from customers to improve their services regarding any concern raised
by customers.
Improve their customer services so that the customers don’t have to wait for long to get their order placed.
They need to create a better communication channel with the restaurants and customers.

Suggestions for Zomato:

To build a dish database for customers so that they can search for restaurants serving a specific dish.
Spam controlling should be done so that the genuineness of customer reviews can be maintained.
They need to improve their sever in order to handle the widespread traffic efficiently.
 CHAPTER-6
CSR ACTIVITIES UNDERTAKEN BY THE COMPANIES

ZOMATO:

Zomato has acquired Feeding India, a non-profit working towards the aim of eradicating hunger,
malnutrition and food wastage. However, Feeding India will continue to be a non-profit organisation and
thus, all the money it raises or brings in will remain with Feeding India and be used for their mission of
providing ‘food for everyone’.

Zomato, introduced mechanical and electric cycles in their delivery fleet. The brand came up with the
idea as a solution to fight extreme traffic and parking issues. It has delegated the deliveries within 2.5 km
area radius to cyclists who can actually reach faster.

They have partnered with TikTok to spread the message and eradicate food wastage, hunger and
malnutrition in India. On its 11th anniversary, Zomato organised a food drive which was conducted
across 74 cities in India and 11 countries around the world.
The food drive powered by Feeding India which is now a part of Zomato witnessed over 22,000+
volunteers including Zomans who served meals to the underprivileged across shelters. TikTok creators
also became proud Hunger Heroes for the day to celebrate the evening with the underprivileged, donate
food and promote the cause using their wide following through the platform.

Zomato launches “Menus for Change” through this they aim to raise money by creating special menus
through collaborations with restaurant partners. The restaurants will donate 15 percent of the revenue
generated through the special menus to CRY (Child Rights and You).

FOODPANDA:
In 2014 foodpanda decided to celebrate Christmas a little differently through its “Light Up a Soul”
campaign. The campaign focused on making Christmas special for the less fortunate; with the help of
their users they donated 500 kg food and several toys & school supplies to the little inhabitants of the
Mercy Centre.
Teejai.com and foodpanda launched the “Order for Kids” campaign where every order placed between 1
January to 31 March 2015, they pledged 1 baht to the Rice Bucket project. The project supports farmers
who are committed to change and help the children in need.
 CHAPTER-7
FINDINGS AND LEARNINGS

Findings from Zomato:

Better customers services-Zomato focuses on serving the best to its customers and reviewing their
concerns as soon as possible. So, that will ultimately improve customer satisfaction and trust towards
Zomato.

Try to work on their shortcomings- Zomato is the company that is definitely working towards their
shortcomings focusing on better quality, improving delivery services, variety of cuisines etc.

Providing lucrative offer to the customers-Zomato is focusing on providing different offers to the
customers like Zomato Gold, 50% off on first order etc. In order to retain customers for longer period of
time Zomato is providing honest reviews to the customers and changing themselves according to
customers preference.

Learnings from Zomato:

Focusing on customer delight and cohorts-Zomato has worked hard to minimize the order failure rate to
well below 0.5%. Zomato has made the support team easy to access via a chat feature, built right into the
app. It saves customers from the hassle of making phone calls for any kind of order query or request.

Restaurant is as important as the customer-Zomato approach restaurant partners with the understanding
that their relationship will go beyond the transaction. Zomato builds trust and confidence with the
restaurants.

Don’t set expectations that you can't sustain-It is important and sensible to set real and sustainable
expectations with customers. As a company, you should can promise 30-minute delivery with no-
questions-asked refunds for orders below Rs 500.
Findings from Foodpanda:

Orders from nearby restaurants – Orders are only available from restaurants that are in the zone of the
order placed. This is a weak point as all the restaurants will not be available at all places.
Tap on the Free Delivery – Quantity required for free delivery is sometimes a bit more for one person.
Yet to cover more – Foodpanda has not yet covered in all areas in a city.
Therefore, several reasons contribute to the failure of Foodpanda, like fake restaurants and orders,
miscommunication, technical faults, unstructured business model and lack of ownership.

Learnings from Foodpanda:

Structure and a business plan are essential: Launching the app and promoting commercials will not help
in business grow as restaurants and customers were unhappy due to the utter mismanagement in
foodpanda.
Nothing is possible without communication: The customers, Foodpanda and restaurants, these primary
three elements were not aligned as per communication. No initiative was taken to improve the
communication, thus leading the customers opting to the other sites.
Proper administration and authority is important: Rahul Chadda and Mohit Chadda quit the company, but
was it a right decision? Rahul was one of the co-founders of the company. Simply leaving the company
and not making any effort to improve the situation will not do any good. Ola acquired Foodpanda, but the
condition of Ola is itself volatile at present.
 CONCLUSION

Zomato has become a saviour for the people and especially for the people who are busy the whole day,
engaged in different activities and that is what has increased the huge craze about Zomato, where food
will be directly delivered at doorsteps and there will be no question of cooking at home after a very tiring
day. Also, Zomato has been most used ordering application that attracted the customers worldwide with
its innovative strategies and programs. Zomato has become successful by offering correct information
about restaurants as a restaurant guide. On the other hand, if we look at Foodpanda it failed to cater to the
problems faced by both the customers and the restaurants. They failed to adapt themselves according to
the changing needs of the market. One of their major problems was improper planning at all levels.
At last, we would like to conclude that proper planning is very essential because in its absence attainment
of goals is not possible. Proper coordination between the management, partners and employees is also
very crucial for the proper functioning of an organization because in its absence the organisation would
not be able to move in a single direction towards attainment of its objectives. The management that runs
the organisation should remain stable since it’s the people working in the company who decide its future.
If the management keeps on changing than it would confuse and demotivate the employees. The
organizations should modify themselves according to the needs of the changing market. They must act
fast and try to find solutions to problems as soon as possible; if they fail to do so then they will be left far
behind their competitors in this highly competitive market. Nowadays maintaining a good position in the
market has become much more difficult than attaining it. Lastly all the functions of management play a
vital role in deciding the success or failure of an organisation.
 REFERENCES

1. www.crunchbase.com
2. www.codebrew.com
3. www.newspatrolling.com
4. www.marketing91.com
5. www.vedak.com
6. www.thecsrjournal.com
7. www.inc42.com
8. www.indiacsr.com
9. www.timesofindia.com
10.www.foodpandacares.com