The Referee Joined the Game: What Bistro and Snacc Mean for Every Restaurant on an Aggregator

For ten years, restaurants and aggregators had an uneasy deal. The platforms took a heavy commission, but at least they were intermediaries. They connected demand to your kitchen. They did not cook.

That deal is over. Blinkit, owned by Zomato's parent, runs Bistro, a standalone app delivering snacks, meals, and beverages in about ten minutes from dark stores. Swiggy runs Snacc, its own standalone quick delivery app. Zepto Cafe expands in parallel and reportedly forced the incumbents' hand. Many items on these apps carry no restaurant name at all, which the industry reads plainly: the platforms are making the food.

NRAI's response has been unusually blunt. Its leadership has called the move an abuse of dominance, alleging the platforms are leveraging years of accumulated restaurant data, order trends, and customer behavior to enter their own partners' territory, and the association has moved toward the Competition Commission of India on private labeling, on top of the case already pending since 2021. A meeting between NRAI representatives and both companies reportedly ended in stalemate. Some partner restaurants are said to be weighing an exit if the issue is not resolved.

The platforms' defense is that Bistro and Snacc are separate apps that do not use marketplace data. Maybe. But as industry observers have pointed out, the parent companies are the same, and there is no way for a restaurant to verify what flows between entities under one corporate umbrella. Trust is being requested by the party that spent a decade masking your customer data.

Why this is different from every previous fight

Commissions were a cost problem. Data masking was an information problem. Private labels are an existential problem, because the conflict of interest is structural and permanent.

Think about what an aggregator knows that you do not. Which dishes sell at which hours in which pin codes. What price points convert. Where demand outstrips supply. Which of your menu items has the best margin of reorder. Now imagine a competitor with all of that intelligence, zero rent in your neighborhood, a delivery fleet already amortized, and control over the app screen where your customers make decisions. That competitor does not need to beat you at cooking. It needs to appear one row above you.

And there is precedent for the pattern. Both platforms ran cloud kitchen ventures before, Zomato Infrastructure Services and Swiggy Access, which were wound down or sold. Both later ran affordable meal services cooked in company kitchens. The ambition to participate in the market they operate has surfaced repeatedly. Quick commerce simply made the economics attractive enough to try again, at scale, with better data.

A marketplace that competes with its sellers is no longer a neutral marketplace. Every rupee of visibility you buy, every promotion you fund, every new dish you test teaches your landlord what to build next door.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of dependence

None of this means aggregators disappear from a sensible restaurant's strategy tomorrow. They own demand, and demand is real. The question the private label moment forces is narrower and sharper: what share of your business are you comfortable having controlled by a company that now competes with you?

If aggregators are 80 percent of your delivery revenue, your largest sales channel is owned by a rival. It sets your fees, controls your visibility, holds your customer relationships, and studies your sales data while running its own kitchens. No operator would accept that description of any other part of their business.

The strategic answer is not rage. It is rebalancing. Every order you move to a channel you own is an order your competitor cannot see, cannot tax, and cannot learn from.

What rebalancing looks like in practice

Start with your regulars. The customers who order from you weekly do not need an aggregator to find you. They need a direct option that is as easy: a branded ordering link, an app, or WhatsApp ordering where a hello returns your live menu. This is the layer we build at Menuthere, zero commission, synced with Petpooja POS, precisely because the regulars are the profitable segment the aggregators monetize hardest and deserve least.

Price the channels honestly. A direct order saves you 25 to 35 percent in effective deductions. Pass a visible slice of that to the customer and the direct channel sells itself.

Treat your data like the asset the platforms treat it as. Your best sellers, your peak hours, your repeat buyers: on a direct channel, that intelligence accrues to you alone. On an aggregator, you are donating it to the competition's product research.

The platforms have made their position clear. They will operate the market and participate in it, and they are asking partners to trust the wall between the two. Restaurants get to make their position clear too. The ones that spread their demand across channels they own will negotiate from strength. The ones that stay 80 percent dependent are, from this point on, funding their own replacement.

The referee joined the game. Play accordingly.

Menuthere gives restaurants a direct ordering channel the platforms cannot see, tax, or learn from. Zero commission, full Petpooja integration. menuthere.com