Zomato to Share Customer Contact With Restaurants Only After Consent: CEO Mangla

After a news report about Zomato’s user data sharing plans triggered an online debate, its CEO Aditya Mangla clarified that the plans pertain to a new in-app feature that will allow customers the option to opt-in to receive marketing and promotional updates directly from restaurants they order from thereafter.

Taking to LinkedIn, Mangla, who recently took charge of Eternal’s food delivery business, said that Zomato was currently in early stages of launching the said feature on the app. “If and when consent is provided — only phone numbers will be shared with the restaurants. No other information will be shared. There’s nothing sneaky or automatic about it,” his post read.

Earlier in the day, a report by ET said that Zomato was in the final stage of discussions with the restaurants’ representative body, the National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI), to allow restaurants to access customers’ data. The report further said that Zomato’s rival Swiggy is also deliberating to share the key data with its restaurant partners.

It must be noted that customer data has been a point of contention between the food delivery players and their restaurant partners for some time now. 

Earlier in January, NRAI president Sagar Daryani told Inc42 that the delivery giants have access to crucial consumer data but do not share it with restaurant partners. Instead, these players leverage the data to launch new verticals that compete with restaurants.

The body had also moved the competition watchdog CCI, alleging that these platforms were indulging in “anti-competitive practices” through data masking.

Countering the allegations,  Eternal CEO Deepinder Goyal had clarified, “In fact, all Zomato data and insights are available to all restaurant partners and the public through Zomato Trends.”

For context, Zomato Trends is a publicly available platform that analyses millions of transactions on Zomato’s platform to give restaurants—and even the public—data-driven insights on demand trends, price distribution, cuisine popularity, and supply-demand gaps. It was launched in 2023.

However, restaurants have been pushing for greater access to customer data from Zomato as they look to reclaim ownership of the diner relationship that aggregators have increasingly come to control. 

Today, platforms like Zomato know exactly who orders, how often, what they prefer and how much they spend — insights that restaurants themselves rarely see. 

With this data, restaurants can run targeted marketing, loyalty programmes and repeat-order incentives, shifting frequent customers toward their own channels where margins are higher and dependence on aggregators is lower.