One Tap Away from Waste: How Food Delivery Apps Shape Bangalore’s Eating Habits

By Aashi Singh and Gargi Sharma

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It is midnight when you hear a strange sound coming from somewhere near. You turn on the lights to find the source, half expecting to see a dark figure staring at you, but there’s no one else; no ghosts sitting on your desk, no demons floating in the air. The sound comes again, a quiet howl, and you realise it is coming from you…more specifically, your stomach. You are hungry, so you do what any Bangalorean does at 2 a.m. You open a food delivery app, likely Zomato or Swiggy. You scroll through the options while yesterday’s leftovers sit ignored on the kitchen counter, and last week’s food decomposes in the fridge. 

Ordering is easy: one tap, a discount, maybe even free delivery if you add just one more item. Within twenty minutes, the doorbell rings and your stomach quietens. When food is available at any hour, this small, unthinking decision becomes routine. This is often where food waste begins, becoming invisible through convenience and discount schemes that profit corporations while robbing us. 

Urban Lifestyle and Food-Delivery Apps

In a city of long working hours, endless traffic, and packed routines, there is often little time or energy for cooking at home. As a result, people increasingly rely on digital platforms to manage everyday tasks, including cooking. Moreover, since Bangalore is home to migrants from across the country, many of whom are students or working professionals living in apartments or paying guest accommodations, they rely heavily on ordering food. Discounts tempt them as they struggle to manage living costs in the city. 

Due to this, Zomato and Swiggy dominate the city. According to The Times of India, Swiggy and Zomato together have 50 million active monthly users in India, with Bangalore as one of the biggest markets for app‑based food orders. Moreover, India’s app-based food delivery market was valued at around ₹66,000 crore in 2023 and is expected to reach approximately ₹2 lakh crore by 2030. This rapid growth ties convenience with consumption patterns that make food waste harder to notice.

Discounts, Promotions, and Over‑Ordering

Food‑delivery apps work on the psychology of discounts and promotional offers, providing incentives such as free delivery, Buy One Get One (BOGO) deals, and minimum‑order-based discounts, encouraging consumers to add extra items to their cart. They promote overconsumption through the logic that “getting more for the same price is better,” which overrides mindful decision-making. As a result, people end up ordering more food than they can consume, leading to leftovers that are frequently thrown away.

Global research, conducted in countries such as India, Indonesia, and China, on food delivery platforms shows that promotional pricing and ease of ordering are linked with higher levels of food waste, as users are nudged toward larger or multiple orders they don’t finish.  The ease of reordering and the perceived affordability of discounted food reduce the emotional and ethical weight associated with wasting it because users are disconnected from the process of making or delivering the food. This assembly-line style of food preparation makes it easy to ignore what ends up on your plate, who made it, and what you waste.

By invisibilising the labour through which food reaches their plate, people feel freed from the responsibility of valuing it or engaging with it sustainably. It becomes just another commodity, to be used and discarded without regard or care. Such a culture not only takes away the joy of eating but also fuels the never-ending desire to constantly consume, since everything is only a click away. 

Portion Size Ambiguity, and Ignored Requests

Another issue that contributes to food waste is portion size ambiguity on food delivery apps. Many platforms lack standardised portion visuals or clear gram-based descriptions, leaving customers to guess how much food they’re ordering. Users often overestimate how much food they need and adopt a “better to order extra” mindset to avoid being hungry later. A study from Indonesia found that unclear portion information on food apps, combined with promotional incentives, is significantly associated with increased food waste among young users, a pattern likely mirrored in dense urban markets like Bangalore. This uncertainty pushes people to order multiple items, which

may turn out to be far more than they can finish.

Although food delivery apps allow users to add special instructions, these requests are often ignored in practice due to the emphasis on speed and automation. As a result, unwanted extras are delivered and eventually thrown away, contributing directly to food waste and consumer dissatisfaction. This adds to the volume of waste on the consumer side.

Cancellations and Invisible Waste

Moreover, order cancellation also contributes greatly to food wastage. According to the founder and former CEO of Zomato, Deepinder Goyal, around 4 lakh orders are cancelled every month, highlighting how customers treat food in the gig economy, disregarding the labour involved in the preparation and delivery of the food. These everyday inefficiencies highlight the urgent need for greater awareness among both platforms and consumers to make food ordering practices more mindful and less wasteful.

Zomato’s  “Food Rescue” initiative does acknowledge the food wastage by allowing users to claim cancelled orders at a discounted price, within a stipulated time, but it fails to address the larger issue within the food-delivery system, where the wastage of food is just one click away, and profits trump ethics any day.

Rethinking Convenience and Consumption

In Bangalore’s fast city life, food delivery has become a default choice rather than an occasional treat. Apps streamline the process so much that users rarely track what goes uneaten, making waste a by-product of convenience rather than a conscious issue. Rapid market growth, promotional nudges, unclear portion information, ignored customisations, and high cancellation volumes combine to make surplus food an invisible by-product of convenience.

One way to address this problem lies in app features that allow order customisation. Both Zomato and Swiggy already let users select sides or add items for free or by paying extra, mostly to increase quantity. If such features were extended to reduce quantity or remove unwanted items, they could help both users and restaurants in reducing food waste, improving stock management, and potentially increasing profits.

Beyond app-based solutions, the larger remedy lies in reconnecting with local, in-person food spaces such as small eateries, community kitchens, and shared meals. This not only supports local businesses but also fosters connections with the people who cook and serve food, making consumption more mindful and reducing waste. When we see the hands that prepared our meals and the plates we sit around, food stops being disposable and starts being valued.