Various platforms which offer food home delivery services through courier services, such as riders or other types of distributors, have proliferated very quickly in recent years, especially in big cities.
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Due to this boom in last-mile delivery or logistics, UOC experts have studied the operation of the main food home delivery platforms, such as Just Eat, Glovo and Deliveroo, which work in the city of Barcelona, to analyze the profitability of these business models and estimate the number of orders needed to achieve this profitability, Pablo Ramos, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), writes.
"It's very difficult for these business models to be profitable by themselves," said Eduard J. Álvarez Palau, a researcher from the SUMA research group of the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business, the main author of this work together with Ángel A. Juan, principal investigator of the ICSO research group of the UOC's IN3.
During the course of the research, the authors analyzed public data from the different companies to ascertain how the profit is generated on this type of platform. As well as studying the revenues, both those which come directly from the restaurants and those which come from the clients, they also assessed the fixed costs and the variable costs involved in each delivery.
After analyzing the context and the situation, the experts estimate that at least 8,000 orders a day are needed for this type of platform to begin to be profitable from its operation. "This would be the most benevolent scenario. With the alternative scenario, in which we add all those costs related to the expansion of this type of company in other markets, we find that these 8,000 services have to be increased to 19,000 for the operating system to profitable, which is a little surprising," explained Álvarez. ■
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