Zomato addresses claims of drugs being sold on app: ‘We block alcohol, vapes’

Food delivery giant Zomato has finally addressed the viral claims about suspicious ‘one-dish’ restaurants on their app selling undisclosed items with names like “Naughty Strawberry” and “Merry Berry” for high prices.
Responding to a query by HT.com, a Zomato spokesperson said that the company has noticed social media conversations around single-dish restaurants listed on Zomato and identified suspicious restaurants.
“We have identified all such restaurants that were potentially fraudulent and have delisted them from our platform. To solve this more comprehensively, we have also investigated all other restaurants which have a very limited menu on Zomato and might have listed prohibited items or worked around a way to list prohibited items,” they said.
(Also read: Suspicious ‘one-dish’ restaurants pop up on Zomato. The only thing they sell is…)
The food delivery company said that all restaurants listed on Zomato need to have a FSSAI license according to their policy. “We also actively block items such as alcohol, cigarettes/cigars/vapes from being listed on our platform,” they said.
However, Zomato agreed that the “one-dish” restaurants were able to “game our checks” by using generic food names such as, ‘Naughty strawberry’ and ‘Merry Berry’. “We have further strengthened our fraud checks to proactively identify such cases to avoid similar incidents in the future,” the Zomato spokesperson said.
Users on social media flagged a bizarre trend cropping up on Zomato of restaurants offering just one food item appearing in Chandigarh. The outlets have only been offering a single dish at bizarrely-high prices and netizens are confused about what the food item is. In a Reddit post, a user claimed that such restaurants, with no reviews or only negative reviews, have been spotted by many Zomato users in the past few days.
(Also read: Deepinder Goyal seeks Zomato chief of staff: Forget salary, pay ₹20 lakh)
From ‘Naughty Strawberry’ to ‘Blue Adventure’ to ‘Citrus Punch’, the names of the dishes do not clarify what the food item being sold is but that has not stopped users from speculating about the kind of goods being sold. While many labelled the outlets as fronts for drug delivery or money laundering, others claimed that the names of the dishes referred to vape flavours.