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.
I have commented before on the consolidation reshaping global restaurant delivery. But a new question is now emerging: what kind of industry do we get on the other side? As market after market settles toward two dominant platforms, the question is no longer whether duopolies will form. It is whether duopoly produces stability or stagnation – and what it means for everyone who depends on these platforms. Three industries that have already lived through the same journey offer hard-won answers.
Commercial aviation reveals the innovation risk. Boeing and Airbus have controlled virtually 100 percent of the large aircraft market for two decades. For years, direct competition between them drove genuine progress – the 787 Dreamliner, the A350, leaps in fuel efficiency. But with no credible third competitor, Boeing shifted its priorities from engineering to financial returns: share buybacks, production cost-cutting, outsourced design work. The 737 MAX disasters were not merely a quality failure; they were a symptom of what happens when one half of a duopoly decides it can extract value rather than create it, confident that customers have nowhere else to go.
For delivery, the parallel is clear: two-platform markets will innovate only as long as competitive pressure between the two remains genuine.
European telecommunications reveals the pricing risk. When regulators in Austria and Ireland permitted four-to-three mobile operator mergers, academic studies found that prices subsequently rose 14–20 percent. relative to markets that maintained four competitors. The mechanism was not dramatic – promotional intensity simply declined, introductory offers faded, and customer acquisition spending fell.
The parallel to delivery markets where three or four platforms are compressing toward two is striking: the promotional subsidies that benefit consumers and the competitive terms that benefit restaurants tend to be among the first casualties of consolidation.
British grocery reveals the disruption risk – and the opportunity. For decades, four supermarket chains controlled over 75 percent of UK grocery spending. Then Aldi and Lidl arrived as structurally different businesses – radically narrower ranges at dramatically lower prices. Between 2012 and 2024, the discounters’ combined share roughly tripled to over 19 percent. The Big Four had optimised for competing with each other rather than defending against a fundamentally different proposition.
For delivery, the disruption that matters may similarly come not from a third platform replicating the first two, but from structurally different competitors: hyperlocal delivery cooperatives, niche cuisine platforms, or hybrid models where restaurant groups share delivery infrastructure and bypass platforms entirely.
The evidence across these industries points to a consistent pattern. Duopolies are not inherently innovative – they require genuine mutual pressure. Pricing effects are real but gradual, making them politically difficult to address before significant damage is done. And the most dangerous disruption comes not from would-be replicators but from competitors who redefine the terms of competition altogether.
For restaurant operators navigating the consolidation now underway across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, the lesson is both cautionary and encouraging: duopolies feel permanent but rarely are.
The challenge is surviving the interim with enough independence intact to benefit when the landscape shifts again. Because it always does.
