Ola Consumer has temporarily suspended operations of its food delivery service, Ola Foods, marking the latest setback in the SoftBank-backed company’s repeated efforts to break into India’s competitive food delivery market.
The service, which launched on the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) in September 2023, disappeared from the Ola ride-hailing app in recent days and is no longer accepting orders across both its app and ONDC channels. The pause comes just weeks after Ola expanded the service to 100 cities in December 2024, promising customers savings of up to 50% on food orders and introducing a 10-minute delivery service called Dash in Bengaluru.
The shutdown represents Ola’s fourth unsuccessful attempt to establish a foothold in food delivery since 2015. The company first launched Ola Cafe in 2015, a 20-minute food delivery service across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, but shuttered it a year later amid intense competition from Swiggy and Zomato. In 2017, Ola acquired Foodpanda India in an all-stock deal, only to suspend its delivery operations in 2019 while retaining cloud kitchens under Ola Foods. The company experimented with quick commerce through Ola Dash in 2022 before shutting that business down as well.
