Zomato, the food delivery giant we all know today, had the most humble and unusual beginning. It all started when Deepinder Goyal, a 26-year-old working at Bain Consultancy in Gurgaon, noticed a daily struggle at his office cafeteria. Every lunch hour, long queues formed as employees scrambled to browse two fat folders full of menu cards from nearby restaurants. You’d get just two minutes to pick a restaurant, call them, and then wait 45 minutes for your food. The process was chaotic, slow, and frustrating.
One weekend, Deepinder took matters into his own hands. He scanned the 80 restaurant menus and uploaded them on his personal page on the office intranet. Just four days later, the IT department told him 95% of internal traffic was going to his page. That was his ‘Eureka moment.’ If everyone in the office needed this, so would millions outside.
The Birth of FoodieBay and Evolution to Zomato
This tiny idea gave birth to an early version of Zomato, called FoodieBay, a simple website that listed restaurant menus. Over time, this menu aggregator turned into Zomato in 2010, offering restaurant listings, reviews, and recommendations via its smartphone app.
But the real game-changer for Zomato came much later. As Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Naukri.com and an early investor in Zomato, reveals, the company didn’t start food delivery until 2018, almost a decade after launch. It was this pivot into food delivery that saved Zomato during the COVID-19 pandemic. Without it, Zomato might not have survived the crisis.
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A Story of Vision, Pivot, and Survival
From menu card scanning to delivering food to millions, Deepinder Goyal’s journey shows the power of solving simple problems at scale. And as Sanjeev says, without that crucial pivot into delivery, the company may have perished in tough times.
