leo burghaus

Every country has its Uber Eats, Glovo, and Deliveroo. Centralizing food delivery in one app is an evolution that, in retrospect, seemed inevitable. Our cities are now full of underpaid cyclists with colorful bags, readily available to make our lives more convenient. The industry is facing challenges like regulation and increasing tension with restaurants, but the growth numbers have been very strong over the years.

These platforms are here to stay. But I’m curious what would happen if they didn’t. Why? Because I think they have a hidden cost for society: incentivizing excess unhealthy consumption. The service makes it that much easier for our eating to be influenced by companies with a conflict of interest between how they make money and our health.

Could we see it disappearing?

To be fair, food delivery is still a shaky industry. The biggest problem that I see is that the profit margins are too low to be able to resist much change, especially when it comes to regulation. What I mean by that is that regulation has a big impact on these businesses’ revenue. The nearest example is the fight Glovo is having in Spain, with laws forcing companies to contract riders as employees rather than freelancers. The cost for Glovo alone is estimated to be around 100M€.

And they don’t have much space to increase profits because there’s only so much money you can charge for delivery. They are in a sensitive position in which they have to balance restaurants’ desires, customers’ desires (and pockets), and government desires, with few options to give much in any direction.

But even if they might be worried about some of these situations, the industry itself is not in danger. It has established itself in customer behavior, and it is proving good at adapting to the circumstances. One way they do that is with ghost restaurants, which let food delivery companies create their own supply of food and play with the margins. I suspect we will see more of these in the future, and the sheer offer of it will increase its consumption.

Governments will also be careful not to overregulate them to a point where they’re not able to get much taxes from them.

You never know what the future, especially the distant one, holds. But for the foreseeable one, we will continue seeing a strong industry.

Would we want to?

These companies are one of those modern introductions that we accepted because of its benefits, without questioning the counterpart. Yes, it’s convenient and it can make your life easier. I’ve benefited from it, especially from the service that can send you toilet paper, toothpaste, or water bottles at 12 in the night when everything around you is closed. It’s amazing when you’re sick and can order ramen in, and when you’re ordering pizzas with your friends on a football night, and when you want to continue your TV show with your partner without having to stop to cook.

But it makes it too easy to overspend on food, to go against healthier options, and to find excuses not to cook. It’s another piece in a deeply flawed food supply system which incentivizes the wrong behaviors on massive scales. Apart from the whole experience of ordering being full of nudges designed to drive users to buy more than needed, it also encourages food that most of the time contains ultra-processed food and is very energy-dense.

There are studies suggesting correlation between online food delivery increased consumption of energy-dense and nutrient-poor foods. Another even associates it with higher BMI. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, as we know – but it at least should make us think more critically about it. No matter if it’s the cause for poorer health decisions, or just a facilitator, it’s still something that has shown to be problematic. The fact that we spend more and more on these platforms every year also is an indicator that maybe there is something about them incentives excessive behavior, over the baseline we would like to use these apps.

On a more abstract level, it moves us away from traditional ways of understanding community and cuisine, in which cooking was at the center. In all fairnes, it also creates new ones: I’m sure my dad wasn’t the only parent introducing weekly nights of ordering food (Chinese in our case), which was always a day for us to come together. It’s not wrong to have the opportunities for people to come together over food that has been ordered over an app. But the regular use of it is still the loss of either going to the restaurant itself and immersing yourself in the experience, or of cooking at home and confronting yourself with the ingredients, recipes, and efforts it takes to create a meal.

I haven’t thought this through completely, and I might be wrong. I might be one of those cringe 20-somethings that instead of just taking these things for what they are, thinks there is some imminent danger for us, and that the old times were so much better. But I have used these apps a lot, and at times not at all, and I always feel better when I decide against using them. I feel, even if difficult to explain why, that these apps are doing us, as a society, more harm than good. They are deeply flawed.

What would happen if we made them close?

I play with the idea of what would happen (which it won’t) if they had to close from one day to another. We would likely see restaurants having their own delivery service again, something that is disappearing without much of a fight. Maybe more ready-meals will be consumed, at least at the beginning: the frozen pizzas, or the quick take-away on our way home.

But the biggest thing I think of are the tens of thousands of people in precarious situations that would, all of a sudden, be out of a job. These are almost exclusively immigrants who already are in difficult situations. Yes, you could argue that restaurants might need more workers again – but that many? If anything, these companies are providing a weird stepping stone for immigrants. Of course, they are not the ideal job for anyone, but it’s an option nonetheless. Additionally, these companies have a big infrastructure of workers like programmers, analysts, or customer service employees that also depend on this work. So there would be a gap, where I see one group who’d have the biggest difficulties bouncing back.

But, apart from that, nothing would change much. I want to think that people would make better food decisions overall, but I might be wrong. Restaurants would be fuller, and people would cook more. There would be more walks to go get the food, instead of staying at home. But overall, it would have little effect on our day-to-day.

Regardless, I think precisely because we wouldn’t feel much change, it would be a good thing to start taking good collective decisions together. Yes, everyone wants to fight social media or the big food corporations together: but how can we do that if we’re not even able to question food delivery together? Maybe we have, in front of us, a topic where we can all learn to say: ‘Yeah it’s nice, but maybe we don’t need that. Let’s learn together to sacrifice some comfort for the right consumer choices’.

Or, I’m wrong. Maybe we kind of all agreed that this is a luxury we want, and we’re okay with the uglier side of it. It’s a free market, and nobody is forcing anyone to use these platforms, so their popularity is a sign of ‘yes, we want this’. But I can’t help but think that users are being tricked to sign up for a thing that will end up making them eat worse, spend more, and have a weaker relationship with the food they eat – without any warning of it. At least tobacco tells you it will kill you.

Regardless of the final decision we would take with all the cards on the table, I think it’s a good situation to start evaluating what we want as a society. And who knows what we would be able to take on together after it.