Producer: Yagya Sachdeva
Editor: Rahul Sanpui
Cameraperson: Abhishek Ranjan
A Twitter user posted two pictures comparing the offline and online menus of a famous food chain and what is clearly visible from the tweet is that the price on the aggregator app is higher.
Aggregator apps like Swiggy and Zomato have recently come under scrutiny for having the prices of food items to be higher than how they have been priced in the physical menus of various restaurants.
Apps like Swiggy and Zomato are food aggregator apps that list restaurants on their app on a commission basis.
Their primary source of revenue is through the delivery of food, therefore the price of one’s bill on these apps is anyway higher than the bill we would've gotten at the restaurant. However, what’s questionable here is the fact that the price of the food items themselves are higher than those at the restaurant.
Upon investigation, we found out that there were several restaurants where online menu prices did not match the original menu prices. One such example was Nazeer foods at The Great India Place mall in Noida, Sector 18. While a full plate of chicken biryani on the app would cost us Rs 335 on Swiggy, the original menu had priced the same food item for Rs 280.
The above price is devoid of all taxes and delivery charges. Therefore, your online order costs you Rs 55 more!
At one such restaurant, the price of ‘special dahi bhalle’ on the app was Rs 105 and was the same on the physical menu, however after placing the order, the bill breakdown had an Rs 30 extra charge for packaging, under restaurant charges. We asked the restaurant about these “packaging charges” and they told us that the total bill at the restaurant would cost us Rs 110 including all taxes and packaging. This should’ve been the same on the aggregator app too, after which they would have added their delivery charges.
While the restaurant workers told us that these aggregator apps were responsible for this price parity, we reached out to both Swiggy and Zomato for their comments on the same.
Swiggy’s statement indicated that the onus for the price parity lies on the restaurants and not them.
“In order to safeguard consumer experience, Swiggy has undertaken a proactive initiative to encourage its restaurant partners to sign an agreement to maintain price parity with their offline menu. Other checks have also been put in place to discourage partners from overpricing their online menus.”Swiggy reps to The Quint
An official Zomato spokesperson told us:
“We don’t govern the packaging charges on our platform. It’s the restaurant which decides, executes and earns from the added service.”Zomato spokesperson to The Quint
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