Food and a lot more

Food and a lot more

Chaitanya Mathur has been with Zomato for eight months, and he managed to pull off two successful editions of Zomaland in two different cities, and is preparing for the third. 

Zomaland, conceptualised by Mathur, is a two-day fun-filled affair by the brand which brought together the best food outlets in town and a stellar line up of some of the most-sought-after artists in the country. While Zomato started off as a listing business, it evolved into a delivery app, and now it believes in being an all-rounder in the food industry. 
 
“When Zomato was founded, it started off just as a search and order platform, and over the years it’s grown into multiple things. I am from an events background. When I was called in to launch events for Zomato, my question was why are they doing this, what do they want to do? And the answer I got was that Zomato is keen to do anything and everything to do with food as the main focus. My main motive here is to fill that gap in the food-value chain,” says he. 
 
Zomato Live, the year-old department headed by Mathur, is dedicated to creating a variety of events across multiple cities. “Zomato Live is all about creating our presence in the offline space. Till now we’ve done everything online — you search online, order online, when you go to a restaurant to avail the gold membership, you have to do it in the app. This is our step towards going offline and creating experiences for people, which could vary from Zomaland, which is a larger-than-life carnival with music and food, to a curated meal at a restaurant,” says he.
 
While Zomaland is basically a music festival, the event was priced at a fraction of what one would pay to get into other music festivals organised in the city. In fact, even passes for performances by any individual artists featured in the line up would cost more. “The other festival organisers are astounded, they’re looking at us saying, ‘What are you guys doing? And how are you doing it?’,” says Mathur.

While the event was a success in Delhi and Pune, it will be travelling to Bengaluru on March 1-3. “We wanted to wrap up with just three editions of Zomaland in the first year. Currently Zomato is present in 32 countries. Zomaland is an IP we’ve created that we ultimately want to take to all those countries. But before that we want to expand a little more in India. We plan to take it to Mumbai and Hyderabad, and are also looking at doing it in Kolkata and Chennai in the future. Post these cities, we will probably take the event to two tier cities. We’re also looking at organising some college events,” he says.
 
The team is picking cities to organise events based on two factors, says Mathur. “The key markets for events are Mumbai and Delhi. I have also organised a food event in Pune called the Grub Fest three years ago. But at that time, my marketing strategies were too tied to how Delhi works. I realise that every city works differently. Picking the cities to organise Zomaland were based on two things — the first was where Zomato has a strong presence and secondly, where the city would have an audience that would accept an event like this. I always knew Pune has a market for such events. It is one of the most progressive cities in India and the kind of culture that exists here because of a large number of students living here is absolutely open to events like this,” says he. 

Catering to the millennials
A millennial himself, Mathur points out how the youth are bound to their phones. “I’ve noticed that the Zomato app is so popular among the present generation because now they have more options when they want to order in. The company has also given a platform to many entrepreneurs to come out and start business,” says he. 

But with other brands such as Uber Eats and Swiggy at heels, the competition is pushing everyone to think out of the box. “I understand there is competition, there are markets where other brands are stronger. There’s always going to be competition, and this will only make us better, make us want to strive harder and forge ahead. We have recently launched HyperPure in Bengaluru and plan to take it to more cities. It is a B2B service of providing fresh ingredients to restaurants. We tie up with local produce farmers and companies who provide better quality ingredients, then we go to the restaurants we have a tie up with and tell them that instead of going to 10 different places to find fresh and good quality ingredients, we will just bring everything to you in a better, cleaner format. We’ve also started hygiene rating for restaurants,” he informs.

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