40% of restaurants may shut permanently: Survey

Covid-19 pandemic has brought restaurant business across the world to a halt. And, India is not behind when we talk about the loss that Indian restaurants have faced in last 6 months since we have seen the covid-19 cases on rise in the country.

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Dining out industry in India is yet to bounce back and operating at 8-10% of pre-COVID levels. Slump in the industry is largely driven by markets being in lockdown, consumers not stepping out due to fear of transmission and restaurants not opening up, even if the city is not in lockdown, shared a report by delivery platform Zomato.

“Out of the 83% restaurants that are not open for business, 10% restaurants have already shut down permanently and we anticipate an additional 30% restaurants to not reopen at all. Remaining 43% are closed right now but likely to open, as the situation becomes better,” added the report that surveyed over 15000 restaurants across top cities in India.

The food delivery platform that has 180,000 restaurants listed on the platform and nearly 27 million monthly active users, shared that since the lockdown on March 25, it has delivered 70 million orders and estimated that the overall food delivery industry would have done 200 million orders.

‘Restaurants in residential areas were found to be doing 50% better than those in commercial areas and consumers are moving their spends from eating out to home delivery,” added the report.

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According to the report, with companies giving employees the option to work from home, there has been a mass exodus of people from metros to other cities across India – 1 in every 5 Zomato customers in metros (pre-COVID) have opened their app from a smaller town recently. Out of these relocated folks, one third have already started ordering food again from their new location.

Zomato, which competes with Swiggy in India for the delivery business, mentioned that its dining out transactions in markets like New Zealand, UAE and Portugal are already back to pre-COVID levels. However, recovery in India will be slow and would largely be driven by industry’s ability to build back consumer confidence.