"Indore requests more midnight meals than the city of Mumbai," shares Zomato Report

Food ordering and eating habits of Indians are changing with time. With cities like Tuni, Abohar to name a few are ordering their food via online food aggregators. According to recently published report by Zomato, there were some exciting facts that came into limelight. For example, a delivery boy crossed the Brahamputra river on boat in Guwahati to deliver Chicken Hakka Noodles that took around 1.5 hours in total to make the delivery.

Food ordering app Zomato recently published its Annual Report FY19 highlighting its performance over the last year and its ambitions to craft a future where everyone has easy access to fresh, clean and affordable food outside the home. One of the key drivers of this future is its food delivery business which grew from 15 cities to 213 cities in India within a year. Now that tier II, III and even tier V cities are ordering food online, what’s interesting to notice are the unique food ordering habits across India.

It is also interesting to know that an order worth a whopping Rs 1,84,760 was delivered in 415 boxes in Jaipur, and another massive food order was placed by a user in Lucknow worth Rs 16,800.

Also, one of the most surprising facts came where Indore requests more midnight meals than the city of Mumbai that never sleeps.

The Love for Biryani is Never-ending

Whereas, pizza was the most ordered food online in Anand district of Gujarat, Chicken biryani was the most searched dish online at places like Madurai. Also, a recent report published by PwC- FICCI claims that over the last few years, as food delivery apps, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and take-away outlets have begun to dominate, biryani has emerged as an unlikely champion of India’s fast food scene, unseating pizzas and burgers, which used to dominate standardised fast food kitchens. According to food delivery apps, it is among the most popular dish ordered and its demand far surpasses that of Western imports. Online delivery app Swiggy observed that while pizza was the most searched item around the country in 2017, biryani was the most ordered. 13Uber Eats found biryani to be the dish that everyone wanted to start their New Year with. It was the most ordered dish on 1 January.14The trend has caught on so much that industry estimates value the organised biryani delivery industry at around INR2,500 crore. Paradise, Behrouz Biryani, Charcoal Biryani, Biryani Blues, Biryani by Kilo and the Biryani Project are among the ventures which are trying to cash in on this craving.

Smaller Cities are getting Bigger on Food Map

There were some interesting nibbles on user behaviour from the emerging regions of India that showed Tuni, a small town in Andhra Pradesh as the smallest emerging city in food delivery with the highest number of cashless payments. Whereas, the education city Kota in Indian state of Rajasthan is the largest emerging city in food delivery, all thanks to the young crowd that it caters to.

Did you know of any place where bicycles outnumber motorcycles vastly as delivery vehicles? Well, now you know. In Bihar's Gaya and Bhagalpur, Zomato has way more bicycle-riding delivery boys than bike-borne ones.

The report also mentioned that 70% of Zomato’s regular users in Kolhapur had never tried food delivery in their life (even over a phone call), and Zomato was the first food delivery experience of their lives, aha! This is something interesting to bookmark!

When it comes to breakfast, Vijaywada in Andhra Pradesh beats all other cities in the country. According to the report, this city's love for breakfast is way more than any other place in India.

Also, there’s something interesting brewing in Hyderabad and it is too interesting to miss. Over 100 Zomato delivery partners waiting to pick up their assignments at the famous Bawarchi restaurant in Hyderabad. Bawarchi typically receives ~2,000 orders a day from Zomato.

The Gurgaon-based company currently lists over 1 lakh restaurants in India and has a last mile delivery fleet of 180,000 partners. Globally, the food tech giant is present in over 10,000 cities with over 1.4 million active restaurants on the platform.