Why India food app Zomato’s green-only vegetarian delivery fleet has users seeing red
- Online users slam Zomato for being ignorant of divisions over food preferences along caste and religious lines in India
- Indian Muslims and delivery workers have previously faced attacks by Hindus over the consumption of non-vegetarian food
On Tuesday, the app’s co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal announced plans to introduce the “pure vegetarian fleet”.
In a post on X, Goyal said: “Our dedicated Pure Veg Fleet will exclusively handle orders from pure vegetarian restaurants. This ensures that non-vegetarian meals, or even vegetarian meals from non-vegetarian restaurants, will never be delivered in the green packaging designated for our Pure Veg Fleet.”
His post immediately drew brickbats with many online users calling the decision “casteist” and “dangerous”. Some unions, activists and academics are concerned about the segregation of workers wearing separate outfits in green and red, the company’s corporate colour.
Fatima Khan, a journalist on social media, said she would not be surprised if the ‘Pure Veg’ initiative were to lead to discrimination against delivery workers given past incidents where consumers had rejected deliveries based on religious reasons.
