There was a time when only a handful of restaurants would deliver in any given town. Growing up on the south shore of Montreal, the only things you could get delivered were no-frills foods like pizza, poutine, rotisserie chicken, or subs. And when a restaurant did deliver, that service was always offered by the restaurant itself.
Since I was a teenager in the early 1990s, the spread of information communication technologies (smartphones, in particular) has changed the food-delivery landscape radically. First, you can now get a wide array of foods delivered, from cheap chain-restaurant fast food to expensive meals from small independent restaurants. Second, instead of relying on in-house delivery people, most restaurants now rely on third-party services like Doordash, Grubhub, or UberEats. This has important consequences for the environment, labor markets, and nutrition, and these consequences have been amplified by the increased reliance on food-delivery services caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns.
What are the implications of the rise of food-delivery apps–what we refer to as the food-delivery revolution–for policy and research? This is the question my coauthors Eva-Marie Meemken, Tom Reardon, Carolina Vargas, and I tackle in an article in the latest issue of Science.
Here is the abstract:
Globally, consumers have increasingly been getting the meals they consume delivered by third parties such as Doordash, Grubhub, Wolt, or Uber Eats. This trend is attributable to broader changes in food systems and technological and institutional innovation (such as apps and digital platforms and the increased reliance on third parties for food delivery) and has sharply accelerated as a consequence of the lockdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Global revenues for the online food delivery sector were about $90 billion in 2018, rose to $294 billion in 2021, and are expected to exceed $466 billion by 2026. The consequences and policy implications of this “delivery revolution” remain poorly understood but deserve greater attention. We offer an overview of the drivers of the revolution and discuss implications for the environment, nutrition, and decent work, as well as recently implemented and potential policy options to address those consequences.
In answering the question posed in the title of this post, my coauthors and I raise many questions of interest to agricultural, environmental, labor, tech, or urban economists. Given that, we hope this paper will launch a thousand ships.