[HN Gopher] Five companies now control over 90% of the restauran...
___________________________________________________________________
Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery
market
Author : goinggetthem
Score : 109 points
Date : 2025-07-13 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marketsaintefficient.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marketsaintefficient.substack.com)
| tptacek wrote:
| I would care a lot more if this market had even existed as
| recently as 15 years ago, but most of what this article is making
| a case for is that the next 5 years in this space are almost
| completely unpredictable.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| And the alternative to restaurant delivery service is really
| the way we get the other 98% of our food. Anything I can ignore
| without being at some sort of disadvantage I don't really get
| worked up about consolidation.
|
| I wish we had more than 3 cell phone networks, this could all
| be one and I'll just drive to the restaurant.
| tptacek wrote:
| There was a discourse prior to the last election about how
| cost of living was out of control based on people sharing
| delivery bills from their "burrito taxi". I do get that this
| article isn't "about" that discourse, it's about an
| investment thesis, but my real point is just: there is no
| reason to believe any part of this market has settled to the
| point where you could make reliable predictions. Everything
| is very new.
| morsch wrote:
| I don't understand, are you saying the market was so small that
| it might as well not have existed? I don't have the impression
| that it's gotten magnitudes bigger here in Germany, maybe in
| China it did (what hasn't), in the US...? People just use the
| web instead of using a phone. AT&T didn't charge a commission.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Realistically in the US before the various online delivery
| companies figured out how to make it work, most places just
| didn't do delivery at all. Traditionally pizza places and
| Chinese food were something you could order delivered. Almost
| everything else was either drive through or take-out.
| asdff wrote:
| What is sort of crazy is that these delivery services
| didn't even supplant pizza delivery. All the major chain
| pizza delivery places and most of the local spots all still
| run their own delivery service long into this app era.
|
| It kind of makes sense. App delivery is notorious for being
| pretty terrible service quality and having the food end up
| worse with more time spent between kitchen and you eating
| it. Pizza delivery on the other hand has been seen as quick
| with drivers interested in earning their tip, pizza places
| being conservative with delivery radius to not overextend
| their drivers, etc. Customers don't like getting an
| inferior product or service one day.
| to11mtm wrote:
| > App delivery is notorious for being pretty terrible
| service quality and having the food end up worse with
| more time spent between kitchen and you eating it. Pizza
| delivery on the other hand has been seen as quick with
| drivers interested in earning their tip, pizza places
| being conservative with delivery radius to not overextend
| their drivers, etc. Customers don't like getting an
| inferior product or service one day.
|
| Additionally, at least in my experience it's pretty easy
| to get to where just paying the delivery fee of a pizza
| place is cheaper than paying for inflated per-item rates.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >are you saying the market was so small that it might as well
| not have existed?
|
| They're saying that the space these companies are competing
| in literally did not exist. It didn't in the US, maybe not 15
| years ago, but 20 years ago it was nonexistent.
| toast0 wrote:
| Waiters on Wheels was founded in 1987 and had cornered the
| market. But they really only did large orders as far as I'm
| aware; used more for a corporate lunch than a dinner for
| two at home.
| zoky wrote:
| B2B and B2C are so different from each other they are
| essentially entirely different market segments, even if
| they are providing roughly equivalent services.
| ro_bit wrote:
| The title scared me a bit before I opened the article and
| realized it was talking about restaurant->consumer food delivery
| services. While that isn't great, I was initially thinking was
| that the companies that facilitate the food delivery supply
| chains around the world were massively consolidated (I sure hope
| they aren't)
| Tostino wrote:
| I built one of the trade promotion management (TPM) tools used
| in that space and had to deal with these companies daily for
| the last decade.
|
| There are absolutely a bunch of acquisitions/ consolidation in
| that food distribution space, but there are still hundreds of
| different distributors just in the US. However, most volume
| does flow through the largest distributors.
|
| For example, I had to build a specific feature to merge
| distributors after an acquisition happens in the industry, to
| make the product work properly because that's such a common
| occurrence. Had the same type of feature for manufacturers (my
| customers) also, because they kept buying each other.
| ro_bit wrote:
| Thanks for your response! I love this forum for how many
| experts chime in in the comments section
| ks2048 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the food supply sources are massively
| consolidated. I don't know about the delivery part or why that
| would matter more than the actual food production.
|
| A quick search will lead to quotes like "Four companies now
| control more than half of the market in chicken processing
| (Tyson, JBS, Perdue, and Sanderson), close to 70 percent in
| pork (Smithfield, JBS, Tyson, and Hormel), and nearly three
| quarters in beef (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef)"
| khurs wrote:
| Margins on food staples like Chicken are very low, which
| suggests that consolidation is inevitable.
|
| Supermarket margins are also very low.
| Tostino wrote:
| I've worked in the industry for over a decade and food
| distributors can squeeze the manufacturers more than the
| other way around. That's a very silly statement if you read
| it with any knowledge of the space.
| Reason077 wrote:
| The food service industry certainly has some major global
| players too. Names like Bidfood, Sysco, PFG, etc. In some
| cases, these same companies cater/supply everything from
| prison, school, and hospital kitchens through to fancy airline
| lounges and high-end restaurants!
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Sysco runs on some tight margins too. I heard a rumor that
| the a while back the price of fuel sharply went up which
| would cause Sysco's beef subsidiary to lose money getting
| beef from ranch -> packing -> market so they went out and
| killed 80,000 heads of cattle because it was less of a loss
| than bringing them all to market.
|
| The catering company you are thinking of is Aramark.
| robocat wrote:
| > Bidfood
|
| Wow - I didn't realise bidfood.co.nz was a US chain
| bidfood.com (Bidcorp).
|
| Food markets keep closing down.
|
| The consolidation of restaurant suppliers really affects the
| quality of taste a restaurant can get. My ex was a cook and
| the worse restaurants wouldn't even make their own sauces
| like Hollandaise - she would tell me what brand it was (often
| a restaurant supplier brand). It is noticeable when the chef
| has hand-selected their supplies e.g. tomatoes that have
| flavour.
|
| The root cause is that consumers tend to optimise for cost.
|
| Quality is harder to give a number to.
|
| We're not completely screwed yet - with time/effort (and
| moderate means) you can find some amazing places at normal
| prices.
|
| And there are people willing-enough to spend time/effort plus
| wealthy-enough but that market is much smaller (more
| exclusive). And unfortunately there are a lot of expensive
| places that don't optimise for food quality (because people
| desire other things for their money e.g. obsequiousness,
| rent-a-vibe cuisine, gastroflex, mealfluencing, yadayada).
| Aside: Roget's gets spanked by AI when looking for modern
| words.
| Tostino wrote:
| As somebody that built a TPM product for the industry, I hate
| prison and school bids. It's so fucking dystopian.
| hammock wrote:
| restaurant food distribution is event more consolidated. For
| example in the Midwest there is really only 1-2 companies you
| can get your seafood from. It has its pros and cons. Source: I
| work in restaurants and I also supply these distributors
| closewith wrote:
| > total food delivery market worldwide
|
| This is the article's claim, but I'm fairly certain it's of the
| food delivery aggregator market. There's still plenty of
| independents.
| flymasterv wrote:
| Yeah, there's no way Domino's doesn't appear on that chart.
| mrweasel wrote:
| One of those companies are available where I live, and I'll never
| use them, because they make my pick ups insufferable.
|
| I have kids, and can see McDonalds from my bedroom window, so I
| have more McDonalds points than I care to admit. Wolt is pissing
| me off every time. The amount of time the McDonalds staff needs
| to dedicate to Wolt staff is insane. They could easily serve
| twice the customer in resturante/drive-through if they didn't
| have to help a borderline incompetent Wolt staffer on a moped.
| It's actually rude to priorities deliveries over in restaurant
| customers. For that alone I will never use Wolt. Fortunately
| every single good pizza place nearby have their own drivers, who
| are actually polite and competent.
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| Rappi is missing. It's huge in all of Latin America.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly
| every industry where they have come to dominate.
|
| This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially
| a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always
| to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many
| tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-
| Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much
| smaller regional scale. I think that many of the growing problems
| in society today are fundamentally attributable to the extreme
| concentration of wealth and power that modern tech enables.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's the story of most mature industries. Food delivery also
| remains cutthroat enough that this is a strange place to launch
| this complaint from.
| sroussey wrote:
| It is also weird that there isn't a company with 2/3 of the
| market. Eventually it will happen i guess.
| TylerE wrote:
| Sysco is probably pretty close if you ignore the extremes
| of the market.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >This is essentially the story of tech companies across nearly
| every industry where they have come to dominate.
|
| It is the only possible result of consumptive transactional
| organizations.
|
| Conquest in all forms is accretion and consumption based, until
| the organization gets to large to sustain a consistent
| direction, then it collapses and the people get pulled into
| many smaller companies.
|
| Those companies get accreted into a new superset
| monopolist/duoploist etc... and the bubble grows again and then
| explodes.
|
| Wash rinse repeat forever at different abstraction levels.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| And why is a large monopoly a net negative? I read his book and
| he says that monopolies are 10x better products, and if
| monopolies are 10x better then why are they bad? Are you
| arguing that it would be better to keep using 10x worse
| products, for the sake of there not being any monopolies?
| fabian2k wrote:
| How can a company make delivery 10x better?
|
| The expected result of a monopoly are rising prices and at
| best indifferent service and quality.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > How can a company make delivery 10x better?
|
| By improving the consumer experience. Better optimizations
| of which couriers go where and by what routes, faster
| delivery times (and hence warmer food), menus and
| restaurant directories optimized to show you what you
| actually want, better delivery time estimation, no need to
| talk to a human or re-enter your details for each new
| restaurant, that sort of thing.
|
| At Uber scale, you have people working on improving
| metrics, and those improvements translate across all the
| restaurants that exist across the world. "John's Chicken"
| won't hire their own guys to do A/B testing on which
| pictures of their food generate more sales.
| teddyh wrote:
| A monopoly _could_ be 10 times as good, but what is their
| incentive to _be_ 10 times as good?
| miki123211 wrote:
| We have to distinguish between monopolies that keep their
| status by being great versus monopolies that have something
| else going on.
|
| Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a
| very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are
| in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual
| query execution. The more users you have, the more you can
| spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more
| you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more
| users.
|
| This leads to the situation where you only have two
| competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only
| exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this
| is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If
| Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google,
| people would gradually start switching.
|
| 20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon.
| It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the
| barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set
| almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't
| have a choice anyway.
|
| [1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still
| fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Large and dominant companies can be a net good, at least in
| theory. In practice they become corrupted because of
| incentives to maximize profit by any means possible, with few
| who can oppose them.
|
| When well regulated one can have most of the benefits without
| many of the downsides. Sadly, even the regulators become
| captured.
| nomadygnt wrote:
| Monopolies are anti-competitive. Without competition there is
| no incentive for innovation, lowering prices, not price-
| gouging etc. Is a 10x better product really 10x better if it
| is also 10x more expensive and there is no alternative?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Not innovating, maintaining high prices, and price-gouging
| are unstable activities for a monopoly, as in it would open
| up a void for effective competition. The real anti-
| competitive actions is that it becomes cost effective to do
| regulatory capture / pay bribes to politicians. A monopoly
| can pay to play in a way that fledging competitors cannot.
| Once the industry has been captured then they can do rent
| seeking behaviors without worrying about competition.
| A1kmm wrote:
| If allowed, an incumbent monopoly will do the minimum
| innovation or tactical pricing necessary to keep out
| competitors - even if it means they suffer a temporary
| loss.
|
| This can effectively create a barrier to entry high
| enough that no small company has a chance to beat them.
| Since insolvency before overcoming the barrier is
| foreseeable, no one even tries, and the monopoly gets to
| keep high prices (compared to a competitive market if
| they weren't there).
| Herring wrote:
| > Not innovating, maintaining high prices, and price-
| gouging are unstable activities for a monopoly
|
| Depends how good their moat is. Or how deep their pockets
| are, because they can often bribe to keep their
| competitors out (Intel vs AMD). Or just buy their
| competitor outright.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Man who believes monopolies are good says they are 10x
| better? Color me shocked...
| astrange wrote:
| Five companies in an industry isn't a monopoly. That's very
| competitive actually.
| tiahura wrote:
| What tech companies? These are food delivery brokers that have
| an app.
| gandalfian wrote:
| And long before that Warren Buffet talking about only backing
| companies who have built a competitive moat.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Less competition would certainly be bad for consumers and
| drivers. But has that actually happened here?
|
| Doordash and Deliveroo do not operate in the same markets, so
| their merger would not reduce competition in any given market.
|
| Prosus is a big conglomerate with its fingers in many different
| industries. But unless it starts buying multiple delivery
| companies that operate in the same markets, its acquisition of
| Just Eat also doesn't appear to be reducing competition.
| asdff wrote:
| I think tech companies that are in sectors like this with a
| great deal of money moving around a few different entities tend
| to inadvertently operate as de facto cartels in a lot of ways.
| They tend to mirror business decisions due to poaching
| eachother for the same talent and consulting with the same
| agencies who are giving them the same information and findings.
| The way they set up their companies and operate is all pretty
| much the same and designed to be similar so as to be useful for
| investors looking to compare businesses in the sector. ux
| patterns are the same or similar enough. How they pay their
| drivers also the same or similar enough. When there is this
| much similarity of behavior in the sector one has to ask if
| there would even be a difference for the consumer between
| having all delivery under 1 company or 10000 companies all
| operating the same business model? No different than a small
| town restaurant scene lost to 15 different chain fast food
| restaurants all operating the same franchise model: customers
| have diversity of business on paper, but not really since it is
| all just more or less the same sort of business with marginally
| different offerings.
| andybak wrote:
| I still tend to discover a takeaway or restaurant and then figure
| out how to get them to deliver.
|
| I've never _not_ ordered from somewhere I was keen on based on
| their choice of delivery service.
|
| If the consolidation results in price hikes and poor service,
| what's the lock-in? Why can't the takeaways just go rogue and
| offer independent deliveries?
| spacephysics wrote:
| Lots of their infrastructure for handling orders (iPads,
| software integration into their payment system) was done around
| Covid, and some have started to integrate in-person orders
| through the same "single unified system" creating a higher and
| higher cost to switch delivery systems.
|
| AFAIK there's no well-supported open source order/delivery
| management software. The companies that were ready during covid
| took all the extra, enormous demand for building delivery and
| order online systems built atop a typically antiquated order
| management system and have stuck around since
|
| Sometimes i'll get a cheaper delivery/food cost calling vs
| ordering online, but now some places are just raising their
| other prices to match online
| bbarnett wrote:
| And yet, why do you need software?
|
| In the 80s, I delivered pizza with no software. The place had
| a normal cash register, for pickups.
|
| People would call, order, and we'd write it down. They it'd
| go on a wire with a clothes pin, until made. Then it went
| with the driver.
|
| Each delivery was written down before leaving with it.
|
| This worked for decades for everyone in the industry,
| flawlessly, perfectly, without issue.
|
| Why is software required? Any given reasons are an
| unneccessary complication.
|
| And here's the thing. Even in Palo Alto I order from
| companies still doing it this way.
|
| The above system, paperwork wise .. again, is perfect. It's
| been done forever. It is faster and far less expensive than
| any unified payment and order system.
|
| Seems to me, they're the smart ones.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Everyone hates calling and apps give customers a list of
| restaurants with menus to browse. Restaurants also do all
| of their in-restaurant management with software (why not
| paper? ask them idk) which I assume has some integration
| with the app.
|
| I can imagine some type of open protocol that lets them
| self-host an order service though, or at least an open
| solution that's hosted by many providers and many separate
| apps. That would be nice for everyone
| bbarnett wrote:
| Maybe we should all make the world a better place, suck
| it up, and just call?
|
| Maybe making the world a better place, means human
| interaction and less automation.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| That would make my own world worse
| pizza wrote:
| Say what you will but customers pay to _not_ suck it up
| notatoad wrote:
| as long as you've got enough order volume to keep a
| delivery driver consistently busy, that works fine and the
| apps are unnecessary. for a pizza restaurant, or anybody
| else focused on delivery orders, the apps aren't necessary
|
| the utility of the apps is to distribute the load from
| multiple restaurants across a shared pool of delivery
| drivers, so a restaurant who otherwise wouldn't be able to
| offer delivery can tap into that labour pool for infrequent
| delivery orders. food delivery apps have greatly expanded
| the number of places that offer delivery. most restaurants
| simply didn't offer it before the apps.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Once you have multiple restaurants, you leave the mom and
| pop shop scenario, and move into realms of more sensible
| optimization.
|
| But there are so many independents. And they make very
| good food. And they still do it without apps, and do very
| well.
| 6510 wrote:
| I only order from places that deliver themselves.
| to11mtm wrote:
| > Why can't the takeaways just go rogue and offer independent
| deliveries?
|
| Because many of these delivery 'ad-hoc contractors'[0],
| sometimes even eating cost [1].
|
| Pre-covid, you were often best off as a business either doing
| something that was 'known' to be delivery offered (i.e. pizza)
| or your next best option was to aggressively advertise it and
| have an extra staffer on hand willing to do the deed.
|
| Then, you've also got the other form of arbitrage (or perhaps a
| cost thereof), of smaller independent restaurants/chains being
| unwilling or unable to handle the costs of properly covering
| drivers [2] and their pay when not driving [3].
|
| Some restaurants started doing delivery during covid and kept
| it going. However most around here dropped because the volume
| wasn't worth it to them, on top of the 'streamlined flow'
| (don't need to give a route, the app the person picking up the
| 'pick-up' order is handling, does that for them.)
|
| I'm not saying I _like_ it but I get how it got here.
|
| [0] - Remember that in the early days some of these companies
| would do all sorts of weird things like just have someone order
| on behalf.
|
| [1] - There's an article about this involving 'pizza arbitrage'
| here https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
|
| [2] - To be clear, both the startups as well as locals have a
| checkered history when it comes to proper coverage...
|
| [3] - One can argue that such a person can be made 'useful'
| during the waiting time, however it becomes a complicated
| equation between 'what can this person be paid to do' vs 'are
| they willing to do it for that base'.
| NaOH wrote:
| Regarding your link to the article on pizza arbitrage,
|
| _DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806356 - June 2024
| (147 comments)
|
| _DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32086170 - July 2022
| (230 comments)
|
| _Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 - May 2020 (518
| comments)
| bawolff wrote:
| > Why can't the takeaways just go rogue and offer independent
| deliveries?
|
| Because delivery is really expensive. To do it well over a
| large area you have to have a lot of staff. You also want to
| keep them all busy, so it works better with a lot of
| resturants. Margins are thin, lots of risk in an area that is
| very different from the core activity of the resturant.
|
| Its an almost textbook example of a situation where a
| specialist company makes sense.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good,
| literally "private taxi for your burrito" yet many people spend
| like it isnt.
| to11mtm wrote:
| Restaurant delivery... I tend to agree.
|
| 'nonperishable food' or 'properly packed short travel' (i.e.
| dairy/frozen) IMO is a fairer niche of 'could be non-luxury
| with better societal outcomes', _except_ for the 'as close to
| JIT as possible'. There's ways to optimize the process to where
| something on the scale of 10-20 homes could get their main
| groceries delivered two or 3 times a week and the overall cost
| would be lower than all of them doing so. Yeah you'd need a
| reefer van or an otherwise replenishable source of cold for
| dairy/frozen but at that scale the cost of such makes a lot
| more sense. Biggest problem is getting the right buy-in and
| mindset from consumers.
| watwut wrote:
| Difference is you can stock large quantity of frozen foods
| any time it is convenient to shop. As in, frozen food
| delivery is not all that useful.
|
| When you work from home and cant cook, delivery can happen
| right now. Or if you are having a small gathering with
| friends, delivery makes your life easier exactly when you
| need it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Seeing how many Gen Z people use food delivery services on a
| weekly or even daily basis was mind blowing to me. I've had
| numerous conversations where I've had to bite my tongue when
| younger colleagues complained about finances after also
| explaining that they DoorDash dinner nearly every night. It's
| bizarre.
|
| Not all Gen Z, of course. Most of the younger people I've
| worked with have been generally smart about finances. It's a
| subset who fall into the normalization of luxury services as a
| standard cost.
| esco27 wrote:
| The food industry is due for a good old opensource disruption,
| where each restaurant can setup their private menu hub (like you
| would an instagram account), add their payment processing
| details, and start delivering their own orders. It's a win-win
| for the restaurant and their recurring customers.
| redleader55 wrote:
| What about users? Will they install one app for each restaurant
| they order from on their phone or will they prefer to do
| everything in the same app?
| nickjj wrote:
| There are middle man services for certain types of food in
| certain areas.
|
| For example Slice is a popular one for pizza. I know a
| business owner who uses it.
|
| They have an app and optionally an online menu on your custom
| domain to take online orders and physical hardware for taking
| orders in your store. Think POS system, register, terminal,
| printers, etc..
|
| For a business owner that covers you for accepting online and
| offline orders, and you can deliver direct to your customers.
|
| 95% of his online delivery orders go through this system
| because DoorDash charges him (the business owner) 30% for
| each order so he raised his prices there to partially offset
| that. Slice on the other hand is 5% cheaper than his baseline
| price for online orders for customers so it's a no brainer
| most use that. With that said, way more people call in or
| come in person than using the app. Probably a 90% / 10%
| split.
| Reason077 wrote:
| These certainly exist. My local favourite Thai restaurant has
| its own ordering website and has its own staff deliver the
| order, with no markup over the in-restaurant menu prices.
|
| The company that operates their ordering platform is mobihq.com
| (I have no affiliation with them)
| afavour wrote:
| Stuff like this already exists (AFAIK not open source but cheap
| enough that restaurants would prefer to use it if they could).
| The problem is modifying user behaviour: people _used_ to go
| directly to the restaurant to order food but are now very used
| to opening the food delivery app, browsing it, and ordering.
|
| You could have the slickest ordering experience in the world
| and it won't help you if no one sees it.s
| racedude wrote:
| This.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Worked years ago at a restaurant that had its own website and
| app ordering...
|
| Ubereats and the like still dominated the orders even with the
| 15% upcharge _and even after notifying repeat customers that
| they can save money ordering direct_
|
| The convenience of having one centralized app with one account
| that can summon any food from any restaurant in a 10 mile area
| is just way too strong.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The target audience for consolidated food delivery apps isn't
| the person who wants to manage the fine details of ordering
| from 10-20 different local restaurants.
|
| The majority of people using these apps just want to scroll
| some restaurants and order something quickly. Saving 10% by
| going through extra steps, installing extra apps, going to a
| company's website, and doing custom orders isn't what most of
| their repeat customers want to do.
|
| It's a convenience thing.
| thisisit wrote:
| I think this will be even more consolidated in the future. Or
| mostly duopoly in many markets. Food delivery is capital
| intensive. It is unlikely that new players enter the market.
| Neywiny wrote:
| I think 5 is a good number based on no data or experience. Feels
| like enough where you could reasonably tell one to pound sand if
| they start getting too greedy, while not being forced to just
| take the other 1.
| faizshah wrote:
| Meanwhile I have seen a lot of local restaurants advertising how
| ordering through their own delivery/pickup service can be 30%
| less than Uber Eats or DoorDash on their takeout boxes (and
| consequently in your uber/doordash order). It's interesting that
| some of the POS companies are getting into the market:
| https://www.toasttab.com/local
|
| There's huge room for disruption in this model when a $12
| chipotle order costs the consumer $30 after higher menu prices +
| delivery fees + tip.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| When I worked at a restaurant that did Ubereats/door
| dash/GrubHub, we had a 15% upcharge on order through those
| platforms.
|
| We would tell repeat customers they could use our
| website/app/phone to order directly and save the 15%. Almost no
| one converted. Convenience really is king.
| faizshah wrote:
| So what this POS company is doing that's kind of interesting
| is they have a mobile app just like Uber Eats/Doordash but it
| seems to be direct through the restaurant:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/local-by-toast/id1362180579
|
| Actually when I ordered through it I paid $45 instead of $60
| via DoorDash/Uber Eats but the order was delivered by Uber.
|
| The reason why I think this version will work is because it's
| the same level of convenience in a centralized mobile app so
| single payment method, single portal to browse restaurants
| etc.
|
| (I have no association with this company I just was looking
| into this last week on the train)
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| I know these are three sided marketplaces and difficult to
| coordinate demand and supply ... but why isn't there more locally
| hosted town and city level options that undercut the
| national/international conglomerates? Food delivery is ultimately
| a local thing.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Two companies now control 90% of the phone market. I think the
| restaurant food delivery market is quite healthy.
| khurs wrote:
| Do you mean the App Stores rather than the phone market? That
| is soon to be 3, as Harmony OS takes hold in China and other
| markets.
| bawolff wrote:
| 5 companies dominate a market that 5-10 years ago didn't even
| exist. That doesn't exactly sound terrible.
| afavour wrote:
| Of course it did. People have been ordering delivery food for
| decades. They just called up the restaurant to do it.
| bawolff wrote:
| I dont know where you live, but that was absolutely not true
| where i lived.
|
| The only exception was chinese and pizza. Nobody else offered
| delivery. The current delivery market is much more than that.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Sounds like a fairly normal market structure.
| v5v3 wrote:
| My understanding is that the drivers are non-exclusive and can
| work for multiple companies at the same time.
|
| So as their is a ready supply of drivers, anyone who can raise an
| amount of money, and find a niche can enter the fray?
|
| The suppliers (restaurants) are not happy with 30% or so being
| taken by the giants.
| kurofune wrote:
| Is this surprising?
|
| This is what our actual economic system is all about: a series of
| market oligopolies whose greed is unchecked by our political
| establishment and legal apparatus with the complicity of the
| voting masses. Any attempt to implement measures to palliate the
| social decay and corruption it breeds will be branded as chinese
| communism and opposed by the media and the public.
|
| We have collectively decided that the economy shouldn't be in
| service of the people, canis canem edit.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Regardless of market position, are food delivery companies
| actually making money at the moment?
| paxys wrote:
| I can't think of a single industry or segment, whether consumer
| or enterprise, where 90%+ of the market _isn 't_ controlled by
| 1-5 companies. That's just how business works.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Chinese food restaurant? Lawn service
|
| If I spent more than 2 seconds I could probably think of others
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This post doesn't appear to present any evidence that five
| companies control any significant share of the food delivery
| market. It looks at transaction volume of major deliverers,
| comparing them _to each other_.
|
| But it's not at all clear that major deliverers are even a
| majority of the delivery market. There are no pizza chains on the
| list. There are certainly no individual restaurants on the list.
|
| > Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user
|
| Delivery in China (through Alipay, which may or may not be backed
| by Meituan) is generally _cheaper_ after fees than it would be if
| you just went and bought the food in person. This might explain
| why Meituan has so much more transaction value than Doordash and
| Uber Eats. But it 's not something I'd imagine drives a lot of
| user complaints.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I honestly just can't comprehend how people so easily just throw
| away money on these apps - The fees are ridiculous on top of
| already expensive restaurant prices.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| > As long as food delivery is better than other ways of consuming
| food, like cooking, takeaways, or dining out, it will be able to
| keep customers in the network.
|
| Made me laugh out loud. It's strictly the worst option. Only use
| it if my job wants to pay, or if very sick.
|
| Cold food. Unpredictable delivery times. More expensive than
| eating out. Usually less nutritious than cooking yourself. And of
| course expensive as hell.
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