The funniest thing is happening in Indian food delivery right now. Swiggy is operating two food delivery apps with overlapping restaurant listings, but one app charges you less for the same food from the same restaurant. But why did Swiggy feel the need to build Toing at all?
Toing's promise is one that no Indian food delivery platform has formally made and kept - app prices that match offline/dine-in prices.
The answer is Rapido's Ownly, a zero-commission food delivery app that mirrors what Rapido already did in ride-hailing to grow from the bottom of the market. Ownly is structurally dangerous for the incumbents. Rapido already has two of the three sides of the food delivery marketplace solved. They have the delivery fleet and consumer demand. The only missing piece is restaurants. Adding that third side costs a fraction of what Zomato and Swiggy spent building all three from scratch.
There's a utilization argument too. Ride-hailing peaks during commute hours (7-10 AM and 5-8 PM). Food delivery peaks at lunch and dinner. Combined, a Rapido rider can stay busy 12-14 hours a day across both services. That means higher daily earnings for Rapido riders, lower churn, and a structural cost advantage that's hard to replicate.
And then there's the market expansion thesis. India's food delivery market has stagnated at ~25 million MTUs. If you want to order something for ₹150-200, the fee structure on Zomato and Swiggy makes it almost irrational, pricing out a massive segment of potential customers. On the restaurant side, smaller establishments for whom 30% commissions don't make sense either stay off these platforms or struggle to make the economics work.
Ownly's model doesn't just compete for existing customers but also potentially unlocks new ones, like ride-hailing users who weren't ordering food online or restaurants that are too small for a high-commission structure.
Swiggy knows that if they wait until Ownly scales to respond, it'll be too late to launch a competing low-cost model. So they're doing it preemptively, even at the cost of running two competing apps. The calculus is that it's better to cannibalize yourself than let someone else do it for you.
If Rapido forces the entire model to become leaner, we could see a new cycle of market expansion in food delivery.