Exclusive: Ola Hits The Brakes On Its Food Delivery Service Ola Cafe

Cab hailing app, Ola has shut down its food-delivery service ‘Ola Cafe’. This comes a few days after the news of shutdown of its grocery service, Ola Store, surfaced in the media.

The Ola Cafe icon has disappeared from the Ola app, nationally. The service was launched last year in March.

Users in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi have confirmed that the service is no longer available. A person close to the development said that Ola Cafe has been shut down officially and a few customers have been informed of the development.

Recently, there were reports of Ola Store, the grocery delivery app, being shut down by the unicorn. Mint was the first one to report about an impending shutdown of Ola Cafe.

Ola was seemingly trying to imitate the US-based company Uber’s food delivery model (uberEATS) in the country. But it seems to have backfired for them.

The company made a formal announcement on its blog today-

Your response has been overwhelming and we’d like to believe that you have had a wonderful experience with Ola Café and Ola Store!

As we strengthen our focus on building mobility for a billion people, we are drawing these two experiments to a close and taking learnings from these to serve you better in the time to come.

The Ola Store app and Ola Café category on the Ola app will not be available from this week onwards. We understand that you will miss receiving your favourite food or your daily groceries within minutes from our respective services. But then, all good experiments have to come to an end and we are happy that you were part of this journey!

Ola, a unicorn from India is facing tough competition from its global rival Uber in the taxi- space. Flipkart, India’s biggest online commerce company had shut down its grocery delivery service Nearby two weeks ago.

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