There are accidents that happen on the roads every day, and they are individually tragic... there is no denying that. But you don’t stop traffic. What happened in Noida last week was undeniably tragic; it happened to another brother in the restaurant field,” muses Vikrant Batra of Café Delhi Heights, which has two outlets in Noida. Mentioning that such an incident could have happened to any one, Batra adds, “How can such an incident stop an industry?”
As reported by several media outlets, a late-night fracas between a cloud kitchen owner and allegedly a delivery agent’s friends led to the former’s murder in Greater Noida’s Mitra Enclave last week. Earlier, officials had decided to take a firm stance and thereupon ban all late-night deliveries post 10pm (11pm according to a recent mandate). They have now stated that all delivery agents and their vehicles operating in the region need a police verification certificate.
“Around 7,000 (the vast majority) riders who deliver in Noida are employed (majorly) by Zomato, with the rest employed by Swiggy. I am glad that they are now coming under the scanner because it has also applied to other organisations,” says a restaurateur who did not wish to be named.
Trying to bridge that gap is restaurateur Varun Khera, president of the Noida chapter of National Restaurant Association Of India (NRAI). “We are in deep talks with the authorities and police. We are getting all verification done as soon as possible, but the onus does lie on major aggregators. There could be an incident anytime, anywhere. Restaurants have trusted someone to get your food to your door, because we trust the third party has done their due diligence.”
Khera is in constant communication with police authorities as a restaurant owner as well as exercising due diligence as NRAI’s Noida chapter head. “As a restaurant owner, one hour less in Noida makes little difference to me. But as someone in my position, I constantly worry about the effect this has on places that are night-out destinations in Noida. Hence my engagement with the authorities as well as colleagues,” he says, adding that he hopes to make things safer and better.
Batra, on the other hand, discusses another side to this development. He says, “We get every late-night order delivered by third parties. As someone with minimal presence in Noida, I rely on the diligence of third party apps and delivery services. Now, I have done due diligence in vetting every person I hire, be it at work or at home.”
Kabir Singh of QSR chain Burger Singh elucidates further, “We are operating on very thin margins (between 15-20%) anyway, out of which a big sliver goes to the delivery services we employ. This new restriction has dented our recovery rate. I imagine it will be a 10-day latency for us to recover to what we were projecting.”
Hinting that Noida and Greater Noida are big markets for the F&B industry Singh concludes, “Four years ago, I would not have allowed any of my staff to deliver to Greater Noida. Today they’re one of our biggest markets in the NCR. That being said, I’ll admit all of this has just been a school of hard knocks and we’re still learning. We are still surviving.”