Zomato's CEO taunted the restaurant association leading a revolt against Zomato Gold

Zomato Gold was a subscription that gave Indian diners deep discounts — often a free or buy-one-get-one dish — at partner restaurants. By August 2019, close to 2,000 restaurants in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Kolkata had had enough. Led by the National Restaurant Association of India, they began delisting themselves from Zomato Gold and similar discount apps under a campaign they called #LogOut, saying the 'unsustainable' discounts were training customers to chase deals and wrecking their margins.

Zomato's founder, Deepinder Goyal, responded with an eight-point thread on Twitter. Part of it was conciliatory: he admitted that 'we have made mistakes,' called the revolt 'a wake up call,' and acknowledged that bargain hunters had joined Gold and were 'hurting some segments of the restaurant industry very badly.' He asked restaurant owners to stop the campaign and promised to modify Gold into a 'win win.'

But Goyal also went on the attack. He accused the association's president, Rahul Singh, of 'driving the #logout campaign along with some big restaurant owners and using NRAI to sabotage aggregators and derive benefits for their own businesses,' pointing out that Singh's own restaurants offered Gold discounts. 'Welcome to Gold, Rahul!' he taunted, and declared that 'Zomato is logging out of the logout campaign.' Naming and mocking the man leading the revolt did not split it; it confirmed the partners' belief that Zomato saw them as adversaries, not customers.