Bengaluru: Swiggy’s decision to shut down its standalone 10-minute food-delivery app Snacc underscores the steep financial hurdles of ultra-fast food fulfillment, a format that remains difficult to scale even with simplified operations. Industry executives told Mint that the move highlights the persistent struggle to build a viable business model in a space where multiple platforms are still racing to find a solution.
“Speed alone does not make food delivery work. Creating demand density and keeping costs in control will decide the winners,” said Satish Meena, analyst at market research firm Datum Intelligence.
Capex-heavy business
Rolled out in January 2025, Snacc was designed to simplify the 10-minute delivery model by limiting operational complexity. While it sourced supplies from third-party hotels, restaurants and catering vendors, the platform also operated its own kitchen infrastructure and partnered with beverage-machine providers to deliver easy-to-prepare items such as tea and coffee from dark stores. Snacc was available in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Noida.
Through partnerships with select eateries such as Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters and The Whole Truth Foods, Snacc offered a tightly curated menu with a limited number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) to allow for faster preparation and dispatch.
However, managing procurement and fulfillment end-to-end appears to have kept costs elevated, highlighting the constraints of the model compared with a marketplace-led aggregation model, in which the platform acts as a pure intermediary, connecting users to existing businesses that handle their own cooking and packing.
“While the product-market fit was emerging, the broader economics made it challenging to scale. We want to concentrate all our energies on innovation that drives stronger long-term potential,” Swiggy told employees on Thursday.
Swiggy’s rivals, however, continue to test similar formats. Blinkit’s in-house hot-food offering, Bistro, is seeing early signs of product-market fit, the company said in its December-quarter letter to shareholders. “We are seeing early signs of product-market-fit, reflected in healthy throughput per outlet and early signs of a possible path to profitability,” Eternal Limited’s chief financial officer Akshant Goyal said.
Industry executives said the coming months will reveal whether Bistro and other rival offerings such as Accel-backed Swish and Zepto Cafe can scale sustainably. “Hitting product-market fit is one thing, but scaling it without burning cash is where most instant food models will be tested,” Datum’s Meena noted.
Swiggy did not respond to Mint’s queries.
Economics of speed and scale
The biggest challenge for 10-minute food delivery is balancing speed with sustainable unit economics. Unlike restaurant aggregation, instant food formats require platforms to own demand planning and inventory within tight delivery radiuses. This drives up fixed costs through investments in dark stores, equipment and staffing, all while facing constant pressure to maintain average order values.
However, margins at the product level are typically higher as platforms procure wholesale supplies directly from vendors. “You’re essentially trying to run a retail supply chain and a kitchen network at the same time, but with slightly higher margins,” Datum’s Meena said.
Moreover, the model relies heavily on micro-markets, typically large business parks where daily demand tends to be high. This makes scaling especially tricky as demand patterns can vary significantly across cities and even neighbourhoods, according to an executive at a cloud kitchen operator in Bengaluru, who wished to remain anonymous. “Unless order density is consistently high within these micro-markets, the cost of fulfilling each order will outweigh margins,” this person added.
However, Blinkit’s Bistro appears to be at an advantage despite having a similar business model. Eternal’s restaurant supplies business Hyperpure supports faster menu innovation and “significantly reduces go-to-market timelines for new product launches”, enabling quicker experimentation and standardization, and faster rollouts, the company said in its Q3 letter to shareholders.
But higher investments in Bistro resulted in a loss of nearly ₹50 crore in the December quarter for Eternal’s ‘others’ segment, on account of kitchen infrastructure costs. Zepto Cafe, too, has been scrambling to keep up, leading it to close 200 stores in November last year over muted demand in those areas.
Food delivery remains the cash cow
Amid the turbulence in quick commerce and ultra-fast food delivery experiments, food delivery will continue to be the financial backbone for the top hyperlocal platforms for the foreseeable future. A Bernstein Research report from November 2025 noted that while quick commerce will remain fiercely competitive, the food delivery segment still serves as the “cash machine” of the online commerce ecosystem, underpinning steady profits and cash flows even as growth moderates below 20%.
Swiggy’s food-delivery arm posted 20% year-on-year growth to ₹8,959 crore in gross order value (GOV) in the December quarter, its fastest in three years. Eternal’s food delivery business saw net order value (NOV) growth touch 16.6% year-on-year in the same quarter from 13.8% year-on-year in the previous year, driven by higher order frequency and a modest uptick in demand.
Platforms also continue to test new initiatives within food delivery. For Swiggy, new initiatives such as Bolt, 99-store and EatRight have found product-market fit, with the first two now accounting for more than 20% of the firm’s food delivery order volumes, Swiggy said in its Q3 earnings call. “We will continue driving investments in platform innovations to the extent that makes sense,” Swiggy’s food delivery CEO Rohit Kapoor told Mint last month.