Contributing editor, Peter Backman, is a long-term foodservice sector guru and founder of theDelivery.World, a platform that connects the delivery sector and makes sense of the myriad changes and challenges that affect the sector across the globe.
The consolidation story in restaurant delivery has largely been told from the platform side: who is acquiring whom, which markets are settling into duopoly, and what the DoorDash playbook means once it lands in new territories. But there is a parallel story unfolding, quieter and less celebrated, among the restaurants on the other side of those commission agreements.
Across markets, operators are actively working to reduce their platform dependence — and some of what they are doing is beginning to work.
The most visible response is first-party ordering. Chains from McDonald’s to mid-market regional operators have invested in branded apps that route orders directly, bypassing platform commissions. In the US, Domino’s built its entire growth model around this premise—owning the customer relationship so completely that it resisted joining third-party platforms for years, and grew market share while doing so. That model is not universally replicable: it requires scale, marketing budget, and a brand strong enough to pull customers away from the convenience of a single aggregator app. But for larger chains, first-party ordering is no longer optional – it is table stakes.
Independent operators have a different set of tools available.
A growing ecosystem of B2B providers–Olo in the US, Deliverect across Europe and the Middle East, Bopple in Australia – offers order management, loyalty, and direct-channel infrastructure that is platform-agnostic. Technology that was previously available only to operators large enough to build it themselves is now accessible at a fraction of the cost. Uptake has been uneven – many smaller operators lack the margin or bandwidth to implement effectively—but the direction of travel is clear.
Collective action is the most nascent response. In several European markets, restaurant associations have lobbied – with partial success—for commission caps and transparency requirements. In South Korea, a government-backed platform launched to offer a lower-commission alternative after the Woowa/Baemin merger tightened the market.
These interventions are blunt instruments and rarely durable, but they signal that the power asymmetry between platforms and restaurants is now firmly on the political agenda.
The straight assessment is that none of these responses fundamentally alters the structural position of restaurants relative to platforms.
First-party investment helps chains; it does not solve the problem for the independent operator who cannot afford to build an audience from scratch. B2B tools reduce friction but do not replace the discovery and demand that platforms generate.
Regulatory interventions tend to protect yesterday’s market structure rather than build tomorrow’s alternatives.
What this means in practice – as DoorDash’s US playbook arrives in Europe and the Middle East through the Deliveroo integration – is that the window for restaurants to build platform-independent customer relationships is narrowing, not widening.
Operators who act now, before subscriber lock-in and tiered commission structures make the terms of dependence harder to escape, are better positioned than those who wait. Fighting back is possible. It is just more effective before the consolidation is complete.
