Daybreak - Your phone number is at the center of a fight between Zomato and Indian restaurants

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

India's restaurants just won a four-year battle for customer data access from Zomato and Swiggy. But here's the twist: this "victory" comes precisely as the industry becomes more platform-dependent than ever. While the NRAI celebrates phone number sharing, investors are pouring billions into QSRs and cloud kitchens—business models that assume permanent platform capture. With delivery platforms extracting 16-30% commissions and controlling discovery, logistics, and customer acquisition, data sharing is less a power shift and more a pressure valve. The real story? Restaurants are betting that platform-enabled scale will overcome platform-extracted margins. Host Rachel Varghese explores.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Ramon, Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. When it comes to using your quick commerce apps, there are two types of people.

Some of us don't really go through the details or read between the lines. We just open the app, place the order and then move on with our life. The other set, as well, the people whose curiosity is triggered even by the little changes they notice. Usually I'm part of the first set. But for once, I saw something on Zomato that made me pause. If you have Zomato on your phone right now, I want you to open it. Go to your profile section and scroll down till you reach the food orders bit. There's a new option under it now called, here from restaurants.

What you see when you click on that entry is a prompt in the signature Zomato red. It asks you if you want to share your phone number with the restaurants you order from to receive offers directly from them. Your options are, share my phone number or do not share my phone number. Two bullet points follow. One is the standard about terms and conditions and privacy policies. The other is the important one. It says once shared, your information cannot be withdrawn. At first, it seems like a simple straightforward update. But you'll be surprised to know that it is actually the result of high drama that has been brewing for almost a decade. Between restaurants and platforms like Zomato and Swiki.

Restaurants, which are the backbone of these platforms, have a long list of grievances against them. Some of them you probably already know. Hefty commissions, deep discounting and even manipulating the platform to favour their own cloud kitchens. But the one that is at the centre of this particular update is data masking. Up until now, there was no way. for restaurants to see who their customers really were.

They'd only know what the order volumes in a certain area were like. There was no way for them to build loyalty or even convert one-time purchases into regulars. Of course, Zomato and Swiggy pushed back on these allegations. But their defense for the data masking was also valid. You can't just hand over contact details of customers that easily. It could lead to people being annoyed by spam and could break the trust users placed in the app.

After all, it's about privacy. But now, finally, these food delivery giants have agreed to share customer phone numbers and their order history with restaurants. And of course, the sharing is going to be based on consumer consent. You see, restaurants need contact and order histories of their customers to make smarter decisions about spending. Think about it like this. Companies like Zomato and Swiggy aren't just aggregators. They are also competitors.

especially through their cloud kitchen offerings like bistro and snack, which is why this access to basic data would make restaurants less dependent on these platforms. Also, it's just fair play, right? But there's more to it, and it's got a lot to do with timing. This win for restaurants comes at a time when they're more dependent on these platforms than ever before. Discovery, delivery, reach, so much of what makes a restaurant successful depends on their positioning on an app. So how much of a difference does data sharing actually make for these restaurants? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken.

I'm your host, Rachel Ruggies, and every day of the week, my co-host, NICTA Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 28th of November. First, let me take you back to 2021. This was when the NRAI, the National Restaurant Association of India, first filed their complaint with the CCI or the Competition Commission of India. The NRAI represents 5,000 Indian restaurants. Like we mentioned before, the allegations were quite serious.

So it didn't take long for CCI to launch an official antitrust investigation. Last year, Reuters reported that the investigation showed that Zomato and Swiggy were in fact engaging in anti-competition activities. And of course, the restaurants that fueled their entire business model were bearing the brunt. The CCI found that Zomato and Swigy used exclusive Dismic. to favour some restaurants over others. For instance, Zomato offered low commission rates to restaurants that agreed to work only on its platform, while Swigy promised guaranteed growth to restaurants that listed exclusively with it. In some cases, they were also accused of insisting that the restaurants used the platform's delivery services exclusively.

The investigation is actually still underway, though most of the information from it has been under wraps. You see, Zomato controls nearly 60% of the food delivery market. Swiggy controls another almost 40%. It's kind of a doopoly at this stage. And restaurants have become so dependent on these companies that these platforms can easily do whatever they want. For example, let's imagine you're hungry. Do you open, say, Swiggy,

knowing exactly what you're going to order? Or, because it's the end of the month and you have to tighten the purse strings a little, do you browse around a bit to see what the best offers are? You know, trust the app to give you the best recommendations. To me, the second scenario sounds more familiar. And that is exactly the problem restaurants are facing. Their business relies on being represented in these recommendations.

If they're not, then how will they get orders? But that kind of visibility comes at a price. Platforms like Zomato and Swiggy charge commissions ranging from 16 to 30% per order. In some cases, reports say that the commissions have gone as high as 33%, especially when GST charges and payment gateway charges are included. Not just that, even delivery infrastructure is impossible to separate from these platforms. Data or not, restaurants will still need someone to deliver the food and building delivery networks of their own would be far too expensive. So it's likely that eateries will have to continue paying platforms for logistics. Right now,

The rates are typically $25 for orders below $400 and $50 for orders above. And earlier this year, Zomato also added an extra long distance fee of $20 for deliveries that were low value and from 4 to 6 kilometers away. It's really like the restaurants are caught between a rock and a hard place. So now that the decision to share customer details has been made, it feels like a step in the right direction. More on this in the next segment. do restaurants want your phone number? Basically, they want to deepen their relationship with customers. They want to make sure that the customers keep coming back. So, they need to understand consumption behavior and tailor their marketing spends to target the likely regulars.

Previously, Zomato and Swiggy said that they didn't want to share contact information because that could hurt user trust. And it looks like users agree. Take Shiv Sena leader, Milin Diora. In a tweet, he said that this was just going to cause privacyation. and increased chances of data misuse. But there's also something strange about the way the consent prompt is being rolled out by Zomato. You remember how it was almost an exercise in the beginning? It's like the prompt is hidden away. You're not going to be able to find those options unless you're looking or just happen to be

hyper-vigilant like that. It's also weird that it's a blanket consent deal. You don't get to pick which restaurants get your data and which don't. Sure, most of us will have our go-to eateries. But a lot of us still discover new places and experiment with cuisines through apps like Zomato. Which means while we might be okay with our contacts being shared with some restaurants, say your most frequent spots, but that's unlikely to be the case when you're trying a place out for the first time. Plus, even if you decide to withdraw consent, restaurants that already have your data will continue to hold it.

Once you consider all of this, the easiest way to go seems to be just to not share the data at all, and to just go on using the app as you always have. It's almost like Zomato is setting up this experiment to fail. So it seems more like a symbolic gesture than anything else. You know, to look less culpable with an ongoing investigation at hand. Consider this. Zomato and Swiggy don't shy away from sending you notifications every day at every mid-time. If they really wanted you to consider sharing your data,

why didn't this update warrant a site-wide, visible announcement? In fact, just this week, Aditya Mangla, the chief executive of food delivery took to LinkedIn of all places to address the privacy concerns. He clarified that you can withdraw consent to sharing details at any time. But he also admitted that there were technical limitations to retrieving it from restaurants that already had it. Again, no major announcement,

just a LinkedIn post that was then picked up by news sites. And let's face it, we're all tired of notifications. We already get plenty from all our social media apps and then from shopping apps and we'll also continue to get them from the aggregator platforms like Zomato and Zviki. How many people actually want to add individual restaurants to the mix? If at the end of the day you're getting a steel deal, does it really matter to a user where the offers come from? My guess is no, it doesn't.

So increasingly, it's looking like the move to share data is mostly a hollow gesture. Only time will tell if restaurants can actually make something out of this new development. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com. and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.