Unsupervised snack time costed a Zomato delivery executive his job after he was caught on video taking several bites out of a delivery order and then resealing the packet with the trademark Zomato tape to hide any traces of his guilt trip. The man in the video can be seen wearing a Zomato delivery t-shirt and carrying the very recognizable red food delivery bag. Sitting on his scooter, the delivery executive is seen taking several bites out of not one, but two separate containers. He then goes on to seal the aluminium foil boxes, carefully tapering off the corners to make the boxes look unopened. After ensuring a good seal on the boxes, the man puts them back in a plastic bag and further seals off the bag using watermarked Zomato tape.
To his utter horror, the delivery executive was being captured by someone with a smartphone camera, possibly standing in their balcony, enjoying the questionable act unfold in real time. The video was then posted on Twitter followed by a WhatsApp forwarding frenzy.
Quite naturally, the video of the hungry delivery guy came into Zomato’s notice and the company followed up by conducting an internal investigation. “We have found that the video was shot in Madurai; the person in the video is a delivery partner on our fleet. We have spoken to him at length - and while we understand that this was a human error in judgement, have taken him off the platform,” Zomato said in a statement.
The delivery service has also promised to introduce “tamper-proof tapes, and other precautionary measures” in order to avoid any future delivery executives from pilfering food orders. “This incident only makes our commitment to fleet training, scheduling and process even stronger. We stand behind our extensive fleet who do the right thing across many hours of the day," Zomato said concluding its brief statement about the incident.
On a more serious note, it’s probably worth it for Zomato to look into the workload of delivery executives. Given that the delivery executive did not get his say in the whole incident, it’s possible a stressful day of delivering food to others forced him to skip a meal or two. While such incidents should definitely ring alarm bells for a popular delivery service like Zomato, is it possible that there’s more to the story than what we see in the video?