Zomato now does its own food deliveries in Manila

Photo credit: Romina Campos

India’s Zomato today announced it bought a small stake in Philippines-based Quick Delivery, a logistics firm. It didn’t disclose the terms of the deal. This means Zomato is getting more serious about the food delivery aspect of its business.

Zomato started out as a Yelp-style site in India before expanding to new markets and adding features to order food directly.

In the Philippines, Zomato’s been offering food delivery since November. That’s done in partnership with Quick Delivery. Zomato’s acquisition of a stake in the company suggests it wants to slowly gain more control over the logistics of food delivery.

Zomato has made several such strategic acquisitions to expand the business. In the US it acquired NextTable to get into restaurant reservations.

Food tech convergence

Zomanto’s move in the Philippines seems to follow a general trend of convergence in this space. Not only is Zomato branching out from food discovery into delivery and restaurant booking, the process also works the other way round.

Take for example Foodpanda. It started out as an aggregator for food delivery services and then added restaurant reviews through tie-ups with companies active in that space, like in its partnership with OpenRice.