Restaurant Delivery on the Rise as Pickup Falls

Diners order far more pickup than delivery, but PYMNTS research shows delivery is gaining ground.

The Context

Restaurant aggregators are doing everything in their power to make delivery a more appealing proposition for consumers, touting their subscription offerings in an effort to assuage consumers’ reluctance to pay delivery fees.

For instance, the United States leading aggregator, DoorDash, said on a call with analysts last week discussing its fourth-quarter 2022 financial result that it wants its DashPass subscription offering to reach the scale of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

“There’s a lot of room to grow. If you think about the size of the DashPass program, 15 million subs. It’s still a far cry from other programs, whether it’s the number of Netflix members or Prime subscribers,” CFO Prabir Adarkar (soon to take over as president and COO) stated. “There’s a lot of room for us to continue growing, and we’re happy with the pace of growth historically and we’re not seeing any signs of that slowing down.”

Meanwhile, competitor Grubhub has been looking to drive adoption of its comparable subscription offering via partnerships with popular companies.

Last year, the aggregator announced deals with both Bank of America and Amazon, offering the former’s cardholders and the latter’s Prime subscribers free year-long subscriptions to its Grubhub+ delivery subscription.

By the Numbers

According to data from PYMNTS’ new study “Connected Dining: Rising Costs Push Consumers Toward Pickup,” for which we surveyed a census-balanced panel of more than 2,100 United States consumers in January, 39% of consumers ordered their most recent restaurant meal for pickup and 10% for delivery.

Yet, while pickup may outpace delivery four to one, delivery is on the rise, while pickup is losing share. Delivery is up three percentage points from April 2022, the earliest month on record, while pickup is down four points from the same period.