Zomato and Swiggy walk into a bistro, ask to see the menu and the kitchen, have a ‘Snacc’ or two while taking a peek into the sales register, and simply walk out. That would be the beginning of a joke, except restaurants aren’t happy about being the punch line.

Even though both giants have clarified that Bistro and Snacc, their new food delivery models, are not competing with restaurants, this just masks how they both arrived at these models.

If we have to believe the claims of these two giants, they both launched identical 15-minute food delivery products without relying on the playbooks written by other restaurants that have worked with them over the years. That seems a little too hard to digest, especially as the writing was on the wall already for the past few months.

Whatever said and done, this is the new battlefield for Zomato and Swiggy, as the two companies enter another phase in their longstanding rivalry. We dive into the cafe wars this Sunday, but after a look at the top stories from our newsroom this past week:

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The New Face Of Food Delivery

On the face of it, the 15-minute delivery services seem new and fashionable, but in reality they have been in the making for the past year.

Swiggy and Zepto both launched ‘cafe’ services in Bengaluru and Mumbai respectively way back in 2023, but neither of these experiments took off in any meaningful manner. It was only........

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