Are you covering the future of restaurant delivery?
Draft

Are you covering the future of restaurant delivery?

Daniel McCarthy

Assistant Professor of Marketing,  Emory University, Goizueta Business School

The pandemic disrupted how consumers eat, driving us away from on-premise dining and toward delivery platforms like DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub. But the boom in delivery is about to take a hit.


Goizueta Business School professor Dan McCarthy’s latest research says that as dine-in recovers, the delivery side is expected to drop considerably. COVID made the year for restaurant delivery. Industry-wide delivery sales went from ~$23B (2019) to ~$51B (2020), growth of ~$28B. About $19B of that $28B (70% of total) was purely due to the pandemic.


Delivery growth was largely due to people replacing on-premise restaurant visits with delivery orders, either because on-premise dining wasn't allowed due to dine-in restrictions, or because they were afraid to go on-premise for health reasons.

The other major mechanisms -- employment changes, store closures, and individuals staying completely at home -- all depressed delivery sales, all else equal.


Substitution from dine-in more than compensated for those sources of weakness.

If dine-in activity were to return to pre-pandemic levels, McCarthy expects a significant headwind for delivery sales. For more, read the paper here, and the summary here.


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