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Top1. Introduction
Over the years, adoption of mobile devices has seen a steep rise and their usage among the people have also witnessed a huge increase globally. As indicated by Statista (2020a), smartphone users across the globe touched 3.5 billion in 2020, and among them, around 700 million users were from India (Statista, 2020b). Although, mobile based services have penetrated into many industries, its implementation in food delivery app (FDA) is still very nascent. With the growing smartphone user base, FDAs in India are beginning to gain popularity and steadily spreading their tentacles in the Indian market. The online food delivery market in India is around $10 billion which is expected to touch $14 billion by 2024 (Statista, 2020c).
In the interim, the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak created a grave situation and within a span of few months, the virus steadily extended to all the continents of the world (Shi et al., 2020). According to World Health Organization (WHO), around 76,250,431 verified cases of people suffering from Coronavirus were registered worldwide and about 1,699,230 deaths were reported until 22 Dec 2020 (WHO, 2020). Amidst the pandemic, certain safety measures and precautions such as wearing masks in public, physical distancing, avoiding crowds etc. were suggested to the general public to mitigate the risk of spreading the virus (Aquino et al., 2020). Due to these restrictions and safety measures, very few customers seemed interested in dining out at restaurants. According to a report by TRANSFIN (2020), the effect of the pandemic on the restaurant industry in India led to a loss of more than $13 billion.
At the same time, in spite of the detrimental effect of Coronavirus on the business of the restaurant and food sector, the pandemic has altered the people’s consumption behaviour and expedited the metamorphosis of the standalone restaurants from conventional dine-in services to online delivery of food services to survive in this dire situation. A survey conducted among the consumers of Britain, Italy, Brazil, and South Korea has revealed the favourable influence of Covid-19 on FDAs and the continuance intention to use it (Citivelocity, 2020). As physical distancing will continue to remain an important measure to control the menace of Coronavirus worldwide for the coming months; it is highly unlikely that the restaurant and catering industry will be able to recover their losses. Many small restaurants and eateries have already shut their shops due to lack of customer inflow. Hence, online food delivery has come as a sustainable alternative for the restaurants that purely operated on dine-in mode. Even after the easing of social distancing norms, the customers are apprehensive of visiting the restaurants and it is very likely that FDAs will gain more popularity in the times to come. India is witnessing an upsurge in the number of people ordering food online. A detailed study on the effect of Coronavirus on FDAs will be valuable as social distancing and fear of visiting the public places will result in more people using FDAs to order food online instead of going to the restaurants. India having more than 10,099,066 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as on 23rd December, 2020 (WHO, 2020) is likely to persist with the safety norms, and use of FDA may increase even more. In this pandemic period, FDAs are not only able to meet the requirements of the restaurant industry but are also able to satisfy the consumers by providing hygienic food with utmost safety (Liu and Wang, 2020).