After causing a bit of a stir with Blinkit’s printouts-as-a-service, Zomato has now quietly introduced intercity food delivery under the Intercity Legends branding.

The idea is as straightforward as it sounds: Zomato has listed a handful of restaurants from a number of cities in India. One can simply place the order as one would any regular Zomato order.

Zomato says all food is packed by the restaurant and then refrigerated before being shipped via air or road to reach customers the next day. However, some orders may take longer than one day to reach customers.

A Zomato spokesperson said that intercity delivery is still in the early stages of being tested. “It’s an experimentation basis customer requests we had garnered in recent times.  We are glad to be connecting Indians all over, to the most legendary food, synonymous with the cities onboarded as a part of the Intercity Legends offering. It’s too early for us to share any details,” the spokesperson said.

But given the previous Zomato experiments and abandoned them – including Zomato Wings most recently, and grocery delivery and nutraceuticals in the past – the question we need to ask is whether this business is really viable at this moment for Zomato.  Plus, intercity food delivery will not exactly be an cost-efficient play and there’s a big logistics challenge as per founders in this space. So what’s the big idea behind this latest strange experiment by Deepinder Goyal and Zomato?

It’s not exactly clear which audience Zomato is targeting with its intercity food deliveries. Incidentally, the launch is close to the festive season in India, which is expected to kick off next month. This time of the year could see some traction in terms of bulk orders for festivities at home or offices.

But it remains to be seen whether the nostalgia factor is enough of a pull for customers to place intercity orders when a metro such as Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru has no dearth of options