Zomato starts delisting restaurant partners without FSSAI licence

Move comes after the food safety authority’s clampdown

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 4

Food aggregator Zomato on Tuesday said that it has decided to start delisting unlicensed restaurants from its platform.

This delisting drive by Zomato comes after the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) had pulled up food aggregators for not complying with its guidelines that became operational in February.

In a blogpost, Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato, stated that “starting today we are de-listing hundreds of restaurants from our food ordering platform for not being compliant to FSSAI regulations. These restaurants were not able to furnish an FSSAI licence to Zomato.”

“As and when these restaurants provide us their FSSAI licences, we will enable them for online ordering service,” he added.

Zomato also said that some restaurants that were not able to furnish their FSSAI licences but “have high Zomato ratings and high repeat order volumes on Zomato”, have been given time till September-end to comply.

FSSAI guidelines

In its guidelines, the FSSAI has said that it is mandatory for e-commerce food services platforms to display the FSSAI licence or registration number of the restaurants listed on their platforms. In addition, food e-commerce players, excluding those that only provide listing or directory services, need to obtain an FSSAI licence.

However, in a review conducted on August 2, the FSSAI found that 30-40 per cent of restaurants listed on these platforms were either unlicensed or unregistered.

“FSSAI and Zomato have worked together to take strict action in the interest of public health. In fact, we will make sure that we don’t list any cloud kitchen on Zomato unless and until it goes through our mandatory hygiene check,which is a food safety and hygiene checklist,” Goyal wrote in his blog. This hygiene check will be conducted by a third party agency.

The food safety Authority had last month asked food aggregators to submit an action taken report on delisting unlicensed and non-registered restaurants.