At TechSparks 2026, Swiggy's Food Marketplace business chief Rohit Kapoor sketched out a market opportunity that is still far from fully captured: the overwhelming majority of Indians who have never ordered food online. Kapoor said the company's next phase of growth will depend less on squeezing incremental spend from existing heavy users and more on bringing first-time customers into the category, a shift that could redefine the scale of India's food delivery market.
Untapped Demand Pool
Kapoor's central argument was straightforward but significant. If nearly 90% of Indians have yet to try food delivery, then the category remains in an early adoption phase despite years of rapid expansion in urban India. That framing matters because it suggests the market is not approaching saturation so much as entering a broader diffusion cycle, one in which affordability and convenience must reach a much wider consumer base.
He said younger consumers are likely to be a major driver of that expansion. For a generation that is increasingly comfortable with app-based commerce, digital payments and on-demand services, food delivery is becoming less of a luxury and more of a routine consumption habit. Kapoor also pointed to changing household behavior, where busy schedules, smaller family units and evolving preferences around convenience are steadily reshaping how Indians eat.
The remarks come at a time when India's quick commerce and food delivery sectors are under pressure to balance growth with profitability. Investors have become more selective, and platforms are being pushed to show that demand can deepen without relying solely on discounts or aggressive customer acquisition. Kapoor's comments suggest Swiggy sees a large runway ahead, but one that will require a more inclusive pricing and product strategy than the category's early years.
Affordability Drives Expansion
Affordability emerged as the most important lever in Kapoor's outlook. For food delivery to move beyond affluent urban households, platforms must make ordering feel economically rational for a much larger segment of consumers. That means not only lower-cost menu options, but also a service architecture that can support smaller baskets, more frequent orders and a wider spread of restaurants across price points.
The challenge is especially relevant in India, where discretionary spending remains uneven and food delivery competes with home cooking, local eateries and traditional takeout. Kapoor's thesis implies that the next wave of growth will come from reducing the psychological and financial barrier to entry. In practical terms, that could mean more value-focused offerings, sharper restaurant partnerships and product design tailored to first-time users rather than only power customers.
His comments also highlighted a striking duality in the market. On one hand, the category still has enormous headroom because most Indians have not used it. On the other, a relatively small cohort is already using delivery at extraordinary intensity. Kapoor noted that some households now receive more than 200 deliveries a week, underscoring how deeply embedded the service has become for a subset of urban consumers.
Heavy Users, Wider Market
That concentration of usage reveals both the strength and the limitation of the current model. Heavy users provide reliable volume and help platforms refine logistics, assortment and retention. But a business built too heavily around them risks missing the much larger opportunity in the middle of the market, where frequency is lower but the addressable base is far broader.
For Swiggy, the strategic question is how to serve both ends of that spectrum at once. The company must continue to satisfy high-frequency customers who expect speed, reliability and choice, while also designing a simpler, more affordable proposition for consumers who may be ordering for the first time. That balancing act will likely shape product decisions, merchant economics and marketing spend over the next several quarters.
Kapoor's remarks also reflect a broader shift in how India's consumer internet companies are thinking about growth. The era of easy expansion through urban premium users is giving way to a more complex phase in which scale depends on penetration, habit formation and value delivery. In that context, food delivery is no longer just a convenience category; it is becoming a test case for whether digital consumption can move deeper into mainstream India.
For Swiggy, the opportunity is clear: if it can convert first-time users into repeat customers at scale, the market could expand far beyond the current core. The harder task will be doing so without sacrificing unit economics in a sector where every order still has to justify the cost of delivery, service and customer acquisition. Kapoor's message at TechSparks 2026 was that the next big bet is not on the already converted, but on the vast majority still waiting to be won over.