The delivery of food is an optimisation problem that involves 3 parameters: Choice, price and delivery time.

It is almost impossible to have all 3: the largest selection of restaurants/items, the lowest price, and the fastest delivery time.

Doordash grew by targeting the suburbs that had been ignored by Uber Eats. Their key insight was that after a certain point, time to deliver doesn’t matter.

But what if delivery speed was your number one priority?

In that case, you would need to have a minimal selection of items.

Instead of offering a wide range of cuisines and menu items, you would limit yourself to those items that can be prepared quickly and shipped as quickly as any other grocery item the user might have in the shopping basket.

Mostly you limit yourself to snacks and drinks.

The Zepto Cafe, therefore, offers an interesting example of self-imposed restrictions. Both by the provider and the user.

The user does not have to decide which restaurant to order from as long as you ensure a minimum quality bar.

They don’t need to worry about the ETA for different restaurants. What other snacks they need to add to meet the minimum basket value criteria. Whether they have any coupons for that restaurant.

You just choose coffee and a chicken puff, and you know it will arrive in 15 minutes, instead of doing the usual cart building exercise.

You win by reducing the decision variables. By limiting choices.

Over time, people will just order from Zepto Cafe if they need coffee and are too lazy to make it themselves. If they have items in their cart, they simply add a coffee and it comes with the rest.

There is no need to order separately from Instamart and Swiggy Food. And have 2 different deliveries.

This is not the first time that someone has tried to do this. If you remember, Swiggy tried Swiggy Pop a long time ago. It was a selection of 20/30 items that changed depending on the time of the day. During lunch, it would be 20 items that are most relevant to lunch and during snack time, it would be snack items. But if I remember correctly, there were also restaurant names. If you didn’t like the restaurant, had a bad experience in the past, you might not have ordered there. And the delivery time was the same as any other restaurant: ~30 mins.

Zepto Cafe is better because you win on the delivery time and the restaurant does not even come into consideration. Rather than being a winner in a particular segment: Affordable or Premium, they will win on the evening snack order use case. You don’t even need to go to the local tapri/pastry shop for light snacks if you can get your puff and coffee in 15 minutes.

For Zepto, it is an entry into the food space without being in direct competition with Swiggy. It is an extension of use cases for its users. It’s higher AOV. It is better utilisation of their fleet. It is more GMV from their dark stores. And in my view, with this Zepto Cafe working so well, Zepto has shown that they can easily do expansion beyond food.