Zomato India, the Gurugram based restaurant search and food delivery service have gone on to acquire Feeding India, a not-for-profit organization to tackle food wastage and hunger issues. While this acquisition is a part of Zomato’s Corporate Social Responsibility, Feeding India will continue to operate as a non-profit. However, Zomato will be funding the salaries of Feeding India team and will also influence some of its core initiatives.
Zomato Takes Steps Towards Countering Global Hunger Issues and Food Wastage
After the acquisition, Zomato has decided to develop the “Feedi.ng” mobile application, which will connect food donors with the volunteers of Feeding India. Zomato is expecting to feed at the very least 100 million underprivileged people every month through this app according to Economic Times
Apart from this initiative, Zomato will also help in revamping the current website of Feeding India and will be posting the quarterly financials on the website for public transparency. Feeding India was founded in 2014 by Srishti Jain and Ankit Kawatra to counter malnutrition, food wastage, and hunger in India.
Deepinder Goyal, the CEO and founder of Zomato said that in India food wastage takes place at many levels – harvestation, transportation, processing, packaging, and consumption. He also added that this acquisition was carried out to solve this core issue of food wastage in a better way.
With the acquisition of Feeding India, Goyal wants to work towards a common dream of ending food wastage and hunger in India by giving the underserved more than what they get now.
Zomato and Feeding India Join Hands to Make a More Powerful Team
In February 2019, Zomato India first announced the news of this new acquisition through their blog. The blog detailed Zomato’s aim of funding the current sustainable models developed by Feeding India to sustainably feed 20 million hungry people in India. This is one of the major challenges that our country is facing currently.
Feeding India not only works towards donating additional food collected from various events and venues like restaurants, weddings, airports, corporates, etc but also prepares fresh food in unique kitchen-models to provide it to people like children and women, with finite access to nutrition.
Before the acquisition took place, Feeding India, along with its 8,500 volunteers, operated in 65 cities. It had more than 50 community fridges and 12 vans for recovering leftover food.
However, after the acquisition, Feeding India was distributing over 1.1 million meals per month which is a significant expansion from 78,300 meals in a month in December 2018. After the collaboration with Zomato, Feeding India is now working in 82 cities instead of 65 and the volunteer count has also grown from 8,500 to 21,500.
Banner Image Credit: techcircle.in
