Swiggy's year in orders
Every December, Swiggy publishes “How India Swiggy'd”, a review of the year's food orders. The 2024 edition, released on 26 December 2024, reported that Indians ordered 83 million biryanis through the app that year, about 158 a minute or roughly two every second, keeping biryani the most ordered dish for the ninth year in a row. Dinner was the busiest meal, with 215 million orders; dosa reached 23 million orders, and chicken rolls were the most ordered snack with 48 million.
Look at those headlines as an analyst would. Almost every one is a pivot: count of orders by dish, sorted largest first; count by meal time; count by snack category; a rate per minute from a count and the minutes in a year. The work behind such a review is not exotic modelling. It is a clean, long list of orders and the right questions asked of it.
- Write your year-end questions first: most ordered, busiest time, fastest growing.
- Answer each with one pivot from the same clean list.
- Turn the best answers into one-line headlines with a number.
Chapter 2: Your first pivot
Every pivot answers the same question: how much (or how many) of this, broken down by that.
- Turn a business question into rows, columns and values
- Build, format and sort a pivot
- Choose a layout that reads like a report
This article is adapted from the book. Examples marked “Example” use invented names and numbers; company stories are based on public sources listed in the book. For general learning; use your own judgement for your situation.
