Why India food app Zomato’s green-only vegetarian delivery fleet has users seeing red

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.

“Multiple instances have occurred where food deliveries were rejected because the delivery agent was Muslim. The rationale cited was often [we didn’t want our food purity to be tarnished],” said Khan.

Goyal initially stuck to his guns, saying on X on Tuesday: “I have received an overwhelmingly positive response on this launch from so many people. A lot of comments from young people who eat non-veg food saying ‘now my parents can also use Zomato.”

Just hours later, however, Goyal announced a reversal of his plan in a separate post. “While we will continue to maintain a fleet for vegetarian orders, we have decided to eliminate the on-ground segregation by removing the use of the colour green. All our riders, including those in our regular fleet and the fleet for vegetarians, will now wear [the usual] red