Walmart’s Flipkart is quietly building a food delivery challenger in India
- ID
- 37234
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Oct 2026, 10:00 AM
- Fetched
- 20 Oct 2026, 10:02 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/walmarts-flipkart-is-quietly-building-a-food-delivery-challenger-in-india/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 20 Oct 2026, 10:02 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_startup_foundersdevelopers
What happened
Walmart-owned Flipkart is internally testing food delivery in Bengaluru, expanding the trial from a few hundred employees to upwards of 8,000, with a separate tab in its main app and a dedicated rider fleet via Ekart. It draws restaurants from India’s government-backed ONDC network plus directly signed merchants, and riders are already using “Eat-in by Minutes” branding. Bernstein estimates India’s food-delivery market is growing 18% to 20% a year, while online ordering is still just over 15% of food services and Zomato and Swiggy serve an estimated 85 million to 95 million paying customers annually.
Why it matters
If you are building a marketplace or superapp, the concrete pattern here is an ONDC-backed restaurant catalog plus a separate Ekart rider fleet for food, rather than reusing quick-commerce riders; the 8,000-employee internal test is a staged launch model you can copy. For most Malaysian developers, there is no direct stack, policy, or pricing change in this item.
Discussion angle
Would an ONDC-style open restaurant catalog change Malaysian food-delivery economics, or is a closed merchant list plus owned fleet still the better default?