Contributing reporter Peter Backman is a longtime foodservice sector expert 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.
Two platforms hold about 95 percent of Australia’s platform-mediated delivery market. Uber Eats has roughly 64 percent of it, having taken on the customers and restaurants of Menulog, which ceased trading in November 2025; DoorDash has 31 percent. Deliveroo gave up and left in 2022. What is left over is 5 percent, worth close to $370 million a year.
That 5 percent is normally written off as noise, but in theDelivery.World’s country model, it is not anonymous. That portion of the pie is split among HungryPanda, EASI, Foodhub and a handful of others.
In Burwood, the Chinatown of western Sydney, the leading apps are HungryPanda and EASI, which HungryPanda owns. The same residual holds GrubUP, which serves South Asian and Middle Eastern communities and lists home cooks alongside restaurants, because there they are often the same people.
Australia’s diaspora platforms
A 5-percent national share, in other words, can conceal a local lead, and platforms of this kind have a name: diaspora platforms.
They operate in markets the majors already serve, but for one community. HungryPanda, founded in Nottingham in 2017 and now headquartered in London, serves Chinese communities across ten countries; Fantuan, a Canadian platform, operates in four. Neither is a curiosity. HungryPanda reports around $1 billion in annual gross transaction volume, 6.5 million customers and 100,000 merchants, and says it is profitable.
It’s not that these companies have a superior technology or faster delivery; they host a different set of restaurants.
Kelu Liu started HungryPanda after arriving in Nottingham as a student and finding that he could not order the food he actually ate: the dishes hidden on Mandarin-only side menus. A major platform’s coverage stops where its listings stop.
Those same restaurants are also less able to pay mainstream commission, which is the second half of the explanation.
EASI charges its Australian merchants 15 to 25 percent; Uber Eats, in the same market, charges up to 30 percent. That is a rare like-for-like comparison, and it is not a subsidy war: HungryPanda applies much the same range across all ten of its countries, and Liu’s stated reason is that Asian restaurants run thinner profit margins. Take rate is capped by the merchant’s margin, and a platform that bears the cost of a general-purpose network cannot easily fall below it.
None of this is confined to Western host markets.
LAHAT Food— which serves Koreans living in the Philippines, most of them in Metro Manila—lists Korean restaurants first, accepts payment in won, charges a commission of 8 to 15 percent and pays restaurants the following day to steady their cash flow.
Launched in 2018 with much of its interface in Chinese, E-GetS serves the Chinese community in Cambodia, largely in Phnom Penh.
Consolidation within the 5 percent
The segment is also consolidating, and on the same timetable as the mainstream.
HungryPanda paid A$50 million (about $35.5 million USD) for EASI in January 2022 and took New Zealand’s Buy@Home in the same month; Fantuan absorbed Chowbus’s delivery business; and in August 2024, FreshGoGo, which served 210,000 customers in 27 US states, was bought by GrubMarket, a mainstream grocery business rather than a diaspora one. Announcements travel further than aftermaths, though: the EASI purchase ended with a London court ordering EASI to pay HungryPanda almost A$25 million in July 2025.
There is a limit to it, though. A position within a community is defensible but hard to expand beyond. Of the six such platforms identified so far, only E-GetS has moved into the general market, competing on price in mainstream listings, and it probably managed that because its host market was still forming rather than settled. The others have stayed where they began.
None of which says the majors are beatable at their own game. It says their coverage has a border, and that on the other side of it, someone is trading profitably while charging the restaurant less.
