Flipkart to enter food delivery with Bengaluru pilot

A new front for Flipkart

Walmart-owned Flipkart is moving into online food delivery, a market long dominated by Zomato and Swiggy. According to chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy, the company will start with a pilot and decide on national expansion based on customer response and early learnings. Bengaluru has been chosen as the first city, a reflection of both the concentration of Flipkart’s core user base and the expectations tied to the brand in its home market.

The service will be offered on Flipkart’s main platform to begin with, while the company tests a separate standalone application before any wider scaling. The most notable design choice is deep integration with the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce, the interoperable protocol that lets buyers and sellers transact across apps without being locked to a single platform.

Entering a market in flux

Flipkart arrives at a moment when the economics of food delivery are being openly questioned. Zomato and Swiggy remain the incumbents, but newer models are chipping at the standard commission structure. Rapido has rolled out Ownly, a zero-commission proposition aimed at restaurants, while Swiggy has built Toing to court value-conscious diners. By leaning on ONDC, Flipkart is signalling that it wants to compete on a lower-cost rails model rather than replicate the heavy subsidy playbook of the past decade.

For Flipkart, the logic is adjacency. It already runs quick commerce through Flipkart Minutes and operates a large logistics and payments stack. Food is a high-frequency category that can lift engagement across the wider app, even if the standalone unit economics are challenging.

The operator angle

Restaurants and cloud kitchens gain a potential new demand channel, and an ONDC-based route could mean lower take rates than the 20 percent-plus commissions charged by established aggregators. That matters for any operator whose delivery margins are already thin. The trade-off is uncertainty, since a pilot offers no guarantee of scale, and ONDC-led discovery still lags the dedicated food apps on order density.

Brands and kitchens should treat this as an option worth listing on rather than a channel to bank on. The early signal to watch is whether Flipkart moves food onto its main app for reach or pushes users toward a separate destination, because that decision will shape whether food delivery becomes a genuine third choice for consumers or a feature bundled inside a shopping platform.