Zomato customers will now have to ask for cutlery, if needed 

According to the founder Deepinder Goyal, stopping the default delivery of single-use plastic spoons etc, can help the company save up to 5,000 kilos of plastic waste in a day

Food delivery app Zomato on Monday has decided to change the default mode for cutlery, requiring customers to now explicitly “opt-in” for a request for cutlery, tissues, and straws, if they need it. The move comes in a bid to curtail the use of plastic.

Customers always had the option to skip cutlery with their orders. However, very few customers reportedly used that option. Upon surveying, the company found that a whopping 90%+ of the customers said they didn’t need plastic cutlery with their orders.

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“We learnt that it wasn’t because they always wanted the cutlery, but because they weren’t making an active choice. Defaults almost never get changed by customers during product flows,” Zomato stated on its website adding that the change will help their restaurant partners save Rs 2-5 (~0.5-1% of order value) on every order going forward.

According to the founder Deepinder Goyal, stopping the default delivery of single-use plastic spoons etc, can help the company save up to 5,000 kilos of plastic waste in a day.

The feature has already been rolled out for 50 per cent of Zomato’s customers. It will be launched for all customers in the next three to four weeks.

The company said that while it does not expect 100 per cent compliance from the restaurant-end at the onset, it hopes that the change will happen over the next few months.

“We will depend on our customers to drive compliance here. If a restaurant sends you cutlery when they weren’t supposed to, or doesn’t send cutlery when you had asked for it, please share feedback via the post-delivery prompt,” it added.

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