The order that never came home
It was almost 11 pm when Rishabh Kaushik placed a food order through Zomato from Khadak Singh Ka Dhaba in Gurugram. Fairly routine, as late-night hunger goes. But when he opened the app to track his delivery, the location pin wasn't moving. For nearly 40 minutes, it stayed put — and Kaushik started to wonder exactly what was happening to his dinner.
He took to X to share his frustration, writing that rather than finding his food on its way to him, he found the delivery partner's location stationary, with what he described as "two people enjoying my dinner." He also claimed he was told the order had been sold for ₹100. In a pointed aside to Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal, he quipped: "This isn't food delivery anymore. It's a full-fledged food-sharing economy."
What Zomato said — and didn't say
Zomato did respond publicly, asking Kaushik to share his order ID over DM so the team could investigate. That's fairly standard crisis-management on social media. What hasn't happened, at least not publicly, is any confirmation of Kaushik's account. The company has not verified whether the delivery partner ate the food, sold it, or whether something else entirely caused the delay. For now, the story rests on one customer's post and a tracking screenshot.
Kaushik also took a dig at Zomato's customer support, describing it as "a bot sitting there too" — a frustration many Indian food-app users will find painfully relatable.
Why this matters for a food audience in India
The post lit up quickly, and the replies tell you why. Several users jumped in with their own delivery horror stories — two-hour waits, unexplained cancellations, orders that disappeared without refund or explanation. A recurring thread in the comments was the question of cash on delivery: some users said they now default to COD for late-night orders as a safeguard, reasoning that if the food doesn't arrive, at least the money hasn't left. Others pushed back, fairly asking whether payment method really changes anything at all.
But the sharper concern, raised by multiple commenters, was about food safety. If a sealed order can allegedly be opened, consumed or sold before it reaches a customer, what does that mean for tamper-evidence and hygiene? India's food delivery ecosystem has grown at a remarkable pace — Zomato and Swiggy between them handle millions of orders daily — but incidents like this one, verified or not, remind us that the last mile is still the most human, and therefore the most unpredictable, part of the chain. For anyone ordering dinner after 10 pm in a metro city, that's not a small thing to sit with.