NRAI moves CCI against anti-competitive practices by marketplace platforms like Zomato, Swiggy

By Shafali Nigam

Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], July 6 (ANI): National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI) has sought the intervention of the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for resolving issues with food aggregators.
The NRAI has sent its recommendations to the CCI and has participated in various workshops conducted under the aegis of CCI, highlighting various practices which are conducted by marketplace platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato.
Keeping the interest of restaurants in India in mind and how they have been affected by the inherently anti-competitive practices of Zomato and Swiggy, NRAI, on July 1, filed information with the CCI highlighting the practices by the food-delivery companies which have a considerable adverse effect on the competition.
President of NRAI, Anurag Kataria said, “Our issues with the food service aggregators have been in the public domain for fairly a long time. We have been engaging with these aggregators for a year now. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make any significant progress with that, and that is why we were compelled to move CCI to seek an investigation and direction.”

Talking of the issues the restaurants face, he said, “Our issues with them are simple; these are the issues on how e-commerce should function, and how should the relationship between the e-commerce players and restaurants be established.”
“Our primary concerns are bundling of services, data masking and exorbitant commission charges, price parity agreements, deep discounting: forcing the restaurant partners to give discounts to maintain an appropriate listing, the exclusivity of listed restaurants, violation of platform neutrality, vertical integration, and lack of transparency on the platform,” he added.
Kataria said, ‘We are very hopeful that CCI will take cognizance of our information and they will carry out an investigation with the right guidelines which gives equitable rights to both operators and aggregators.’
“As restaurant owners, we totally understand the value of e-commerce and we are absolutely clear that if India has to hit the 5 trillion economy mark, e-commerce has to play a significant role. But any e-commerce which grows without a bottom line cannot be termed as growth, and that is what exactly is happening in the food services space,” he told
NRAI president said, ‘We are expecting the CCI to conduct an investigation. We will wait for going ahead. As far as NRAI is concerned, our doors are always open for the aggregators for dialogue to resolve them, but if we don’t make any progress with these dialogues, then it is a futile waste of time for everyone.’
We have taken this step after failing to negotiate with them and are hoping that the CCI will do the needful to make sure that the food service e-commerce ecosystem works out in a more profitable manner for every state, he said. (ANI)