Online Food Delivery Services in the U.S. - Statistics & Facts

Food delivery has been a sector of the restaurant industry for many years. Before the advent of the internet, delivery was offered by takeout and delivery only restaurants or sit in restaurants with their own delivery service. The internet allowed both of these venue types to broaden their reach and offer consumers an extra channel from which to order. It also led to the creation of aggregated online ordering platforms, which allow consumers to browse through restaurants which offer delivery, and order directly off the platform. In recent years these too have diversified, with some sites enabling customers to order from restaurants with no delivery service of their own. These sites, such as UberEats, provide their own drivers who collect the meal from the chosen restaurant and deliver it to the customer. This has allowed many restaurants, which previously did not have the facilities, to enter the delivery market. Despite the diversification of the delivery market by these innovations, online delivery sales accounted for only four billion U.S. dollars of the total 30 billion U.S. dollar delivery market in 2015.

The market leaders in terms of gross sales in 2015 were the Grubhub and Seamless, which are subsidiaries of the parent company Grubhub Inc. These were followed by Eat24, which operates under the Umbrella of Yelp Inc., and Postmates, which employs its own personnel to pick up and deliver restaurant meals as well as store goods. Grubhub and Seamless had the largest gross sales by far at around 2.4 billion U.S. dollars, almost ten times that of Eat24 which generated gross sales of 264 million U.S. dollars. Grubhub and Eat24 also offered the largest supply of restaurants, with 44 thousand and 30 thousand restaurants available on their platforms respectively.

Despite the domination of the market by Grubhub, a Statista survey conducted in November 2016 found that more consumers reported having used the delivery portal Delivery.com in the last year. Grubhub ranked second and Eat24 ranked joint third with UberEats, the on-demand meal delivery service connected with the Uber taxi app. The potential for many of these online delivery services is substantial with around 44 percent of consumers using food delivery services at least once per month in the United States. Furthermore, the survey also found that 43 percent of consumers claimed to order their food online with an additional 13 percent ordering using a mobile app.

This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.