What started in 2008 as Foodiebay, became Zomato in 2010. The company is now India’s most popular restaurant aggregator and food delivery service, and operates in 24 countries. Earlier in September, the company announced that it will be laying off 10% of its back-end workforce in its head office in Gurugram, India. This came after the organization had already fired 60 of its customer service employees earlier in August. In much less grim news today, Zomato has announced that it will be launching its own video content. Starting September 16, the organization will be launching 18 original shows over the next three months.
The Zomato Originals roster will include shows by superstar-chef Sanjeev Kapoor, social media star ... [+]
The shows will be available on the very popular Zomato app under a brand-new Videos tab. “ Most of our users visit our app several times a week. This presents us with an opportunity to further delight our users using Zomato Originals,” said Deepinder Goyal, CEO and Founder, Zomato. Each video will be “bite-sized” ranging from 3 to 15 minutes in duration. These will be categorized by genres and will help users decide between shows,recipes, and Sneak Peek restaurant stories that, true to its name, offer the viewers a behind-the-scenes access to the way restaurants function. Zomato will begin its video experience with 2000+ videos. The Zomato Originals content will be available to stream in India, while the Sneak Peek and recipe videos can be accessed anywhere in the world. “We are constantly looking for new ways to engage our users around food,” Goyal adds.
“We combined all things food with binge-worthy genres and came up with a diverse slate of shows,” added, Durga Raghunath, Senior Vice President, Growth, Zomato. All the Zomato Originals content revolve around food but doesn’t restrict itself to cooking shows. For instance, in Grandmaster Chef with Sahil Shah, comic Sahil Shah sets off to learn traditional age-old recipes from his grandmother and family members of his acquaintances. “You give me two minutes and I’ll give you health,” says Sanjeev Kapoor, who is perhaps India’s most celebrated chefs, in the trailer for Zomato Originals. On the daily show, Food and You with Sanjeev Kapoor, Kapoor appears, for under 3 minutes, and dispels the myths that people believe about food and breaks the misconceptions people often hold of their food and its relationship to their bodies.
Some of the other shows include Banake Dikha where Sumukhi Suresh, one of India’s best known stand-up comics and food nutritionists, teaches the world how to get their basics in cooking right. The Indian-Jordanian duo of Nas and Beep (collectively called JordIndian) appear in Dude, Where’s the Food, which bases itself upon the duo’s lazy habit of constantly ordering in food. In Starry Meals with Janice, social media star Janice Sequeira visits the kitchens of some of Bollywood’s biggest names and shares a bite with the stars. In the supremely funny Race Against the App, comics Neville Shah, Aadar Malik, and Kautuk Srivastava start a war in their kitchen and begin a race against an in-app order. “With shows in both Hindi and English, we hope every corner of India will tune in to Zomato to hone their taste buds,” Raghunath adds.
Zomato’s online ordering service is available in 500+ Indian cities and delivers more than 1.3 million orders everyday. The company boasts of 70 million+ monthly active users who it aims to engage even further with their brand-new video content.
