Deliveroo has increased sales of local food businesses. E.g. they "boosted the industry's revenue by £460 million in the year to June 2017." [1]

This is not too difficult to believe and to guess the mechanism at play: Before Deliveroo (and similar) services many local restaurants could only be reached by actually visiting them and eating them. Now they can reach people who want to eat at home (and who previously could only order from some pizza/kebab places that were the only ones to deliver). Therefore, all in all, I can believe that they made people order more than before and effectively consume more restaurant food than before. For my household that has certainly been the case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliveroo

> Before Deliveroo (and similar) services many local restaurants could only be reached by actually visiting them and eating them.

The counterpoint to this is that one of the more profitable parts of Deliveroo's business is to do away with these local restaurants entirely in favour of ghost kitchens (which Deliver refers to as "Deliveroo Editions").

So Deliveroo enters a marketplace, sees which local restaurants are doing a brisk trade, and brings in a ghost kitchen that they own and operate (with the higher margins that cutting out an additional party entails).

And to the end user - yourself - this can be very hard to determine, and you can believe yourself to be supporting a local eatery when in fact you're not. In some regards this is not dissimilar to Amazon's approach (find out what third party products are selling well, release their own version and undercut).

That's not how it works.

Ghost kitchens are a good way for restaurant chains to expand by opening these types of kitchens for delivery only instead of having to open a full-blown restaurant at a premium.

For customers it does not matter that their Nando's (just an example, I don't know if Nando's do ghost kitchens) comes from a Nando's full restaurant or a Nando's ghost kitchen. It's exactly the same food and it creates the same number of jobs for people working in kitchens...

It's not Deliveroo that can decide that "Oh, Nando's do a good business here so let's create a fake one by ourselves...".

Now, on the other hand for independent restaurants Deliveroo (and other similar services obviously) can be a good way to expand their customers base by offering delivery without having to invest in the infrastructure.

Ghost kitchens can serve multiple restaurants simultaneously (as they do for the hipster food vans), and with a delivery service, they allow to decouple food brand from food production. Two vans or "restaurants" (brands) operating off the same ghost kitchen will need less cooks than if these two vans/brands made their own food separately.

Ghost kitchens are good at mass-producing generic undifferentiated dishes. If you crave “California roll sushi” or “some kind of vegetarian pizza”, ghost kitchen would work, but so would a grocery store takeout section.

Any restaurant that went through the effort of distinguishing themselves and specializing in a few signature dishes is unlikely to be threatened by ghost kitchens.

I would think that in my city, most restaurants would have struggled to survive through lockdown without Deliveroo and similar services.

In other words, it took a global pandemic to turn these businesses into net positive for society. Temporarily.

I don’t get this level of cynicism. Like they’re a delivery company. People give them monies for someone to deliver food, restaurants give them monies for lead generation and delivery, both parties are happy enough with the transaction to actually do it. Yeah they’re middlemen squeezing customers, drivers, and restaurants but that’s basically all business.

I really enjoy using these services. I went from having pizza and American-Chinese food delivery to having every restaurant in a 15 mile radius. It’s so nice when I’m low energy, having people over, whatever to order better food than chain pizza.

> both parties are happy enough with the transaction to actually do it

That part often isn't true. These companies frequently list restaurants with whom they have no relationship, and when a person makes an order on-line, they just send a driver with a credit card to purchase it takeout and pick it up. It sounds fine on first look, but the way it plays out, this causes huge brand management issues for the restaurants. Customers are charged more than they expect, not realizing delivery company is misrepresenting prices, and complain about delivery problems (which are frequent) to the restaurant, despite that restaurant having nothing to do with delivery, and often no knowledge of it. Sometimes there are even darker shenanigans happening. GrubHub replacing restaurant phone numbers with their own comes to mind.

All this is done to collect/encourage usage data, and then offer the restaurant a formal relationship, in a form of borderline extortion. And as owners of ever growing network/distribution channel, these companies can very much force businesses into accepting very unfavorable deals. They don't care if they're burning these restaurants to the ground, because there will always be more. They make money off the churn.

Don't get me wrong, I like being able to order from a wide variety of restaurants using the same, streamlined interface. But after learning how bad a deal these companies are to the restaurants, I steer away from those platforms. I don't like when multinational corporations are using their weight and dishonest tactics to crush the small entrepreneurs from the community I live in.

> These companies frequently list restaurants with whom they have no relationship, and when a person makes an order on-line, they just send a driver with a credit card to purchase it takeout and pick it up.

This is scummy, but Deliveroo doesn't do that.

The service in itself is alright, but the 35% cut Deliveroo and Uber Eats take is just too much.

It's a very inefficient business. My orders are very often wrong, and they simply refund the whole order. Then the next time I order they get it wrong again and I get refunded again. With Just Eat or direct restaurant delivery, the issue would get resolved on the spot.

There's just no need for such a fat middleman between restaurants and customers. The only reason I'm using it is to exploit the delivery mispricing and promotions, like Uber in its early days.

Obv question: why doesn't someone undercut them if they are making rents? What's the barrier to entry? My local coffee shop does its own delivery. Seems to work. Is it network effects?

Many of those who use it a month or two a year in one region (then go back to another) would disagree.