Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart is gearing up to challenge the country’s entrenched food-delivery duopoly, stepping into a fiercely competitive arena that has previously defeated high-profile attempts by global technology titans Amazon and Google.
The Bengaluru-headquartered company is quietly testing its food-delivery service internally. According to people familiar with the matter, Flipkart has steadily expanded the trial from an initial group of a few hundred employees to upward of 8,000 workers. In preparation for a broader public rollout, the company has deployed a dedicated fleet of delivery riders through its in-house logistics arm, Ekart. These riders operate separately from the personnel who handle Flipkart’s rapid-delivery operations.
For participating employees, the food-delivery service appears as a distinct tab directly inside Flipkart’s primary shopping application, sitting alongside its "Minutes" quick-commerce offering and its travel booking options. The service draws its restaurant inventory from a dual source: eateries listed through the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)—a government-backed initiative designed to seamlessly connect online buyers and sellers across disparate platforms—as well as restaurants that Flipkart has signed up directly through independent partnerships.
Out on the streets of Bengaluru, the southern Indian technology hub where Flipkart is based, riders wearing distinctive jerseys bearing the branding "Eat-in by Minutes" have already begun fulfilling test orders.
As Flipkart expands these operational trials, it is entering a rapidly expanding sector. Industry estimates from brokerage firm Bernstein indicate that India’s online food-delivery market is growing at an annual rate of 18% to 20%. Despite this robust trajectory, online delivery still accounts for just over 15% of the country’s broader food-services industry. Meanwhile, Zomato—owned by Eternal—and Swiggy together serve an estimated 85 million to 95 million paying customers annually, according to Bernstein data. This massive footprint underscores both the immense dominance of the two incumbent platforms and the substantial runway remaining for newcomers to expand online food ordering within the world’s most populous nation, which boasts more than a billion internet subscriptions.
Flipkart is far from alone in seeking to disrupt the status quo. Ride-hailing firm Rapido, which has steadily captured market share and challenged both Uber and its Indian rival Ola in the mobility sector, has been actively testing "Ownly," its own food-delivery service structured around a zero-commission model for restaurants. At the same time, Swiggy has launched "Toing," a separate application specifically engineered for price-sensitive consumers looking for more affordable meal options. Both developments highlight the mounting pressure facing the industry’s conventional pricing structures and the steep commissions that restaurants have long been required to pay.
Industry stakeholders have voiced strong frustration with the current market dynamics. "Monopoly is bad, but duopoly is more pathetic," said Sagar Daryani, president of the New Delhi-headquartered National Restaurant Association of India, an organization representing over 500,000 restaurants nationwide. "What one does, the other follows suit." Daryani argued that eateries across the country have long needed viable alternatives to the two dominant platforms.
Historical precedent highlights the immense difficulty of breaking into this space. Flipkart is far from the first deep-pocketed corporate heavyweight to attempt an incursion into India’s food-delivery ecosystem. In May 2020, Amazon launched its own food-ordering service in Bengaluru, only to shutter the enterprise two years later in late 2022. Similarly, Google’s Areo app, which attempted to bundle food ordering alongside home services in India, failed to gain sustainable market traction. Ride-hailing giant Uber also retreated from the market in March 2020, selling its entire Indian Uber Eats business to Zomato for $206 million.
However, industry observers point to a fundamental structural difference between Flipkart’s approach and the strategies employed by its failed predecessors. While Zomato and Swiggy initially built their core businesses entirely around meal delivery before eventually branching out into quick commerce, Flipkart is executing the exact reverse strategy. The company is leveraging its deeply established e-commerce infrastructure and its rapidly expanding quick-commerce operations as a sturdy springboard into the food-delivery sector.
"Flipkart’s quick commerce benefit will get passed on to food delivery, so it will be leaner, more efficient," Daryani noted.
For restaurants, the primary appeal of new market entrants lies in the potential to lower the soaring costs of selling meals online. Daryani, who also serves as the co-founder and CEO of the prominent dumpling chain Wow! Momo Foods, revealed that Flipkart has proposed a baseline commission structure of approximately 10%. This figure stands in sharp contrast to the 20% to 25% commission rates that restaurants are typically forced to pay Zomato and Swiggy.
Furthermore, commissions represent only a portion of the financial burden. Once digital advertising, mandatory discounting, and other promotional expenditures are factored into the equation, restaurants frequently find themselves spending between 40% and 50% of an order’s total value just to operate on the established platforms. Daryani stated he expects Flipkart to keep that aggregate operational cost closer to 15% or 16%, a shift that could significantly improve profit retention for individual food businesses.
Yet, industry analysts emphasize that successfully onboarding restaurants is only half the battle; winning over price-sensitive consumers is an entirely different hurdle. Bernstein estimates that new market entrants might only be able to save consumers roughly 20 to 30 Indian rupees per order by operating with greater efficiency. Such modest savings may not be sufficient to pull loyal users away from Zomato and Swiggy, particularly if the entrenched incumbents choose to deploy aggressive promotional discounting to defend their market share.
Despite these consumer-side challenges, Flipkart is moving quickly with its expansion roadmap. The company has indicated to restaurant partners that it plans to transition the food-delivery service out of its internal testing phase and launch it publicly by the end of October, with plans to expand operations to five or six major Indian cities before the close of the year.
This strategic food-delivery push also unfolds against the backdrop of an uncertain timeline for Flipkart’s long-awaited initial public offering. Chief Executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy recently declined to commit to a specific timetable for an IPO, even as the company aggressively broadens its footprint into auxiliary business verticals designed to drive more frequent user engagement on its platform.
Flipkart’s latest maneuver coincides with a broader intensification of competition across India’s digital commerce landscape. Quick-commerce platforms that initially gained traction by promising grocery deliveries within minutes have progressively expanded their inventories to include high-value discretionary goods, such as the latest Apple iPhones, bringing them into increasingly direct competition with traditional e-commerce titans like Flipkart and Amazon.
Flipkart did not respond to requests for comment regarding its food-delivery rollout.
