Imagine living in another city and craving that one taste of your hometown—Zomato's Intercity Legends was to make those very flavours come to your doorstep, no matter where you were. It was a service guaranteed to deliver legendary dishes from across India, be it Kolkata's biryani or Mumbai's vada pav. It was a dream for food lovers, but since today, that dream has come to an abrupt close. Zomato just announced the official shut-down of Intercity Legends, and it breaks a lot of hearts of food lovers.
Deepinder Goyal, Co-founder and Group CEO, Zomato, took to X to confirm the closure. "After two years of trying and not finding PMF, we have decided to shut down the service with immediate effect," he wrote.
Zomato announced yesterday that it would shut down its inter-city legends services immediately. Intercity Legends is when Zomato customers can order in iconic dishes from ten cities across India to be delivered right to their doorsteps, no matter where they are located. The company launched this service in 2022 to try a unique way that food lovers could experience authentic regional cuisine while dodging the necessity of travel. Still, the intercity legends did not find financial viability despite its unique appeal.
The service was briefly taken off in April this year, as Zomato took time to reassess its model. Intercity Legends returned in July with a few changes — from a new Rs 5,000 minimum order value to other changes to make the service more profitable. With all those changes still, the service has not quite worked out as expected.
The Gurugram-based company has very often tried out new services that were later discontinued if they did not yield the desired result. For instance, Zomato had earlier shut down Xtreme, its logistics service that enabled merchants to send and receive small parcels, since it failed to deliver the expected results.
With the shutdown of Intercity Legends, food delivery operations of Zomato will now be limited to cities, thus bringing an end to the ambitious experiment of taking the diverse cuisine of India to more people.
Earlier in June, 2024, Zomato had announced a new initiative called the 'Restaurant Services Hub' to facilitate its restaurant partners' growth. These pan-India services offer licensing, taxation, registration of restaurants, trademarking, and FSSAI registrations. The company has now added hiring solutions to the list, all in support of restaurants finding the right staff.