Zomato, a food delivery aggregator, has stopped (on temporary basis) Infinity Dining service from its app ahead of meeting with the National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI) to resolve the issue between food delivery startup and restaurants.
Zomato will be accompanies by Swiggy in the meeting with NRAI.
The reason for the shut down of the service is to incorporate customers’s feedbacks and other suggestions it had received.
“Zomato’s attempt to sell the Infinity feature in the Gold programme broke the final straw. We are not at all surprised that it shut down it had to,” Rahul Singh, president of NRAI, said.
The ongoing row between food aggregators and restaurant partners, in the course of few months, has taken fire and it was imperative for the NRAI to resolve the issue fast.
A #Logout campaign was also initiated by the restaurants, in which around 300 partners started to delist themselves from the app.
Within a few days, the number went up to 2500-3000 restaurants. These protests were then backed by NRAI with over five Lakh members.
Infinity Dining service is a subscription-based premium service of the foodtech unicorn. It allowed users to avail unlimited serving of the whole menu at a fixed per-person price, which was decided by the restaurants.
The service also provides access to open bars.
The infinity option was available in over 350 restaurants and bars in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and Mumbai. Some of the partners of the new feature included Punjabi Grills, Yeti, The Bombay Cartel and more.
Only Zomato Gold subscribers was able to avail the service.
The restaurants also protested against Zomato Gold. The restaurants had blamed these services for barely breaking even the operational cost that went into creating a meal.