On Tuesday, Zomato announced that pure vegetarian food will be delivered by a separate set of delivery boys and girls wearing green-coded dress. The green fleet was meant to distinguish from those delivering non-vegetarian food. The decision has been described by critics on social media as reeking of "casteist segregation". Following a huge controversy, Zomato on Wednesday rolled back the announcement.
"While we are going to continue to have a fleet for vegetarians, we have decided to remove the on-ground segregation of this fleet using the colour green. All our riders — both our regular fleet, and our fleet for vegetarians, will wear the colour red. This means that the fleet meant for vegetarian orders will not be identifiable on the ground (but will show on the app that your veg orders will be served by the veg only fleet)," Deepinder Goyal, the founder of the food aggregator app said.
He further added, "This will ensure that our red uniform delivery partners are not incorrectly associated with non-veg food, and blocked by any Residential Welfare Societies during any special days. Our riders’ physical safety is of paramount importance to us. We now realise that even some of our customers could get into trouble with their landlords, and that would not be a nice thing if that happened because of us."
Publicity stunt?:
There is a theory that Zomato knew what it was doing when it announced the green fleet plan. It wanted to stoke controversy for free publicity. Some of the tweets questioning its decision garnered lakhs of views on X aka Twitter. And now, the reversal of yesterday's decision will give further cheap publicity.
