No, this is not money laundering (it would be a poor one as this will immediately arouse suspicion on such platforms - after all, if you place an order, the del

No, this is not money laundering (it would be a poor one as this will immediately arouse suspicion on such platforms - after all, if you place an order, the delivery person will appear to your kitchen to collect the order and if there is no food they will report you. For this to be successful both Swiggy and Zomato itself need to be involved in it. And as the author noted, food is available from these restaurants, even if it is lousy food.) What the author doesn't realise is that cloud kitchens are a part of the business model of both Swiggy and Zomato. In fact they have many "cloud kitchens" that are run by them. Another business model they have is to identify successful restaurants with huge demand, and contract with them to open a kitchen-only restaurant in another area (they make more profit when deliveries are short distant; so if a far-away restaurant has a lot of demand from a distant area most people don't order because of the higher delivery charges which means disgruntled customers who crib about the high charges). My friend is a chef and he explored the option of tying with them, but dropped the plan as he didn't want a kitchen-only restaurant. I learnt about the contract model when I called up my 2 of my favourite restaurants to complain about the drastic drop in quality of their food - they then told me that was because it was a Swiggy cloud-only kitchen with a new cook nearer to where I live. Like the author, I too was pissed that Swiggy hadn't properly informed me (through their listing) that this was not the restaurant from which I regularly ordered. One of these cloud-kitchen shut down because the original restaurant began to get bad reviews. I believe it was after these kind of issues, that Swiggy and Zomato allowed restaurants to use a different brand for cloud kitchens. And now, it appears, they also allow multiple listings by same restaurants / kitchen-only places too. I now follow the simple rule of only ordering from dine-in restaurants that I have had food from. Or from old and reputed brands of restaurants in my area.