Zomato says ‘food has no religion’ after customer wants food delivered by a Hindu

Food delivery company Zomato on Wednesday refused to resolve a customer’s complaint about being assigned a Muslim delivery executive for his food order in the “holy month” of Shravan. “Food doesn’t have a religion,” the company tweeted.

Deepinder Goyal, the company’s founder, said: “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values.”

A Twitter user who identifies himself as Pandit Amit Shukla, and with the username @NaMo_SARKAAR, tweeted on Tuesday evening that he had cancelled his order after a delivery executive called Faiyaz was assigned to deliver his food. Shukla shared the order status with a map from a locality in Jabalpur.

He also shared a screenshot of the app’s chat support, through which he had requested a different delivery executive. When asked why, Shukla said: “We have Shravan and I don’t need a delivery from a Muslim fellow.”

The customer care executive responded that cancelling the order would cost him Rs 237, and then said: “At Zomato we don’t discriminate on basis of riders, I hope you understand.”

Shukla tweeted: “...they said they can’t change rider and can’t refund on cancellation I said you can’t force me to take a delivery I don’t want don’t refund just cancel.”

He further said that Zomato was “forcing us to take deliveries from people we don’t want”. He claimed he was uninstalling the app as the company was not cooperating and he would discuss the matter with his lawyers.

The tweets received angry responses from several users. One asked if Shukla had ensured that the person who cooked his food was a Hindu, while another pointed out that Shukla’s vehicles run on “Muslim fuel”, that phone was developed by Christians, and that “the world is full of wonderful people who follow all sorts of belief systems”.