One of the largest online food ordering firms in India, Foodpanda has fired more than 300 employees. It represents approximately 15% of its total staff strength. The major reason behind this layoff that the company has now managed to reduce manual intervention and achieved about 98% automation rate in order processing. Therefore, it has reduced the overall workforce by about 15 percent. Currently, Foodpanda is giving a tough competition to Zomato and other emerging startups.

Mr. Saurabh Kochhar, the CEO of Foodpanda India commented,

“While we continued to invest in processes and technology, we also had to take some difficult decisions, but we believe them to be necessary steps on our path to becoming sustainable and profitable with the targeted timeline”.

This termination process is taking place only in the Indian unit of the company offering menus from over 12,000 restaurants, spread across over 200 cities in the country.

Other online food ordering firms, such TinyOwl fired 160 employees in August and followed it by firing another 112 in November. Zomato, which has also laid off around 300 employees in October. Following the same trend, Bengaluru-based food aggregator delivery platform, Eatlo and Mumbai-based hyper-local grocery platform, Localbanya have also suspended their operations temporarily.

Presently, Foodpanda is running over 30 countries globally, continually facing competition in India’s piping hot food ordering and delivery industry. As, Zomato has also entered the food -ordering market, so it is also giving the tough fight to it.