Zomato rolls out 'Climate Conscious Delivery', a new feature to skip cutlery with orders

The online food delivery giant, Zomato, has announced a new environment-friendly initiative called 'Climate Conscious Delivery' that will no longer allow customers to opt-out for the plastic cutlery option, instead they will have to specifically ask opt-in for the same. The customers of the app always had the option to skip the cutlery with their order but very few customers would use that option. Zomato decided that there was a need to make a change in the app to get rid of the default behaviour. 

To find out the truth, Zomato surveyed their customers and found out that more than 90% of the customers never really require plastic cutlery. Therefore, this urged Zomato to change their default mode for cutlery. Now, the customers will have to explicitly request cutlery, tissues, and straws, if they need them. This is now an ‘opt-in’ instead of an ‘opt-out’. 

What was the reason behind the change?

Citing the reason for the change in the approach of delivery, Zomato posted on their website, "We all know that plastic is bad for the environment. But did you know that a single plastic spoon can take 200-500 years to decompose? Millions of such plastic spoons get consumed every day, and we all contribute to it. This seemingly small change on the Zomato app will help save up to 5,000 kilos of plastic in one day – that is up to 2 million kilos of plastic in a year. This is another small step towards cutting down the carbon and environmental footprint of our food delivery business."

It further said, "This change will also help our restaurant partners save ₹2-5 (~0.5-1% of order value) on every order going forward. We urge all our restaurant partners to start channelling these cost savings to kickstart the transition towards non-plastic packaging.

Zomato said that their restaurant partners were excited about this change and they expect no issues while switching to the new default mode. The app said, "We do not expect 100% compliance from the restaurant-end at the onset. Muscle memory needs to change, and we hope that it will happen over the next few months. We also urge other food aggregators to make this change so that the restaurant industry doesn’t have to shard its muscle memory going forward."

(IMAGE: PTI)