Social networking service, Instagram has joined hands with online food aggregators Zomato and Swiggy to support small businesses in India amid the ongoing coronavirus caused Covid-19 crisis. The platform also announced the rollout of the food order sticker in India that will help businesses from the food industry stay in touch with their customers and allow customers to support their favourite businesses too.

Under this initiative, businesses can now share Instagram’s new food order sticker on their Stories, and people can tap to place their order through the Swiggy and Zomato website.

“We want to do our part in helping small businesses stay open, keep in touch with customers, and be informed on how to navigate this crisis. For the food industry in particular, we’re rolling out the food order sticker, which will aid order discovery and spur engagement, and we’re glad to have partnered with Swiggy and Zomato for the same,” Nitin Chopra, Industry Head – E-commerce and Retail, Facebook India, said in a statement in Thursday.

“We’ll continue to work on features that make it easier to support the small businesses you care about,” Chopra added.

To use the sticker, restaurants should have the latest version of the app and use an Instagram business or creator account and they can add one of our partner”s links (Zomato or Swiggy) for food orders to their Instagram profile. They can then share these links to their followers by using the ”Food Order” sticker in ”Stories”, or share on their Instagram Profile with the “Order Food” button.

“Instagram”s food order sticker will not just help restaurants introduce themselves to more customers, improve their engagement but also add a new growth avenue for their business,” said Sandeep Anand, CMO – Growth Marketing, Zomato.

For consumers, when people see options for food orders, they can tap to make the purchase through Zomato or Swiggy”s site.

Srivats TS, vice president, marketing, Swiggy said, “As physical distancing continues and businesses innovate with online models, features like the food order sticker from Instagram will aid engagement between customers and their favourite food businesses, and ideally have a positive impact on increasing online food delivery order volumes.”