Total Delivery App Victory

I read a statistic this week that blew my mind. 75% of all U.S. restaurant orders now leave the building. This includes drive-thru, pickup, and delivery, according to a new report by the National Restaurant Association

Nearly 60% of Gen Z and millennials ordered more takeout this year than last. They describe this behavior as "essential to their lifestyle," a phrase previously reserved for water or electricity. Another 42% participate in drive-thru transactions. Delivery services enter 37% of American homes weekly. This is the new behavioral baseline.

I feel like this shift crept up on all of us. All of us have delivery apps on our phone and occasionally use it. But to the extent that it is used so much that it dominates restaurant sales is surprising. That is until you start noticing what restaurants look like these days. When I walk into my favorite Thai spot on a Friday night, the counter is crowded with white plastic bags and a tense lineup of delivery drivers, usually new immigrants with backpacks on, helmets in hand, waiting impatiently as names are called out in rapid succession. Sure, diners still sit at tables, especially on weekends, but they're now a quiet minority. There's a parallel world existing, based around takeout and delivery.

Restaurant architecture already reflects this seismic shift. New establishments increasingly prioritize kitchen efficiency and pickup logistics over dining ambiance. Some eliminate seating entirely, transforming restaurants from gathering places into mere production facilities.

And then there are the absurd news stories. DoorDash announced it is partnering with Klarna to let customers finance their food orders instead of paying upfront. It's completely real, and entirely logical given the surge in online food ordering. Customers can purchase pad thai in four interest-free installments. This development was inevitable rather than surprising. The companies analyzed the data and identified a market inefficiency they could exploit.

@humphreytalks

Are we cooked chat? DoorDash, $DASH, and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free... See more

Acceleration

But this trend didn’t emerge overnight. Eating prepared meals at home has been rising for years. The graphic below, which stops at 2023, already reveals a pronounced shift and trends have only accelerated since then.

Between 1997 and 2015, spending on food away from home climbed steadily from 41% to around 50%, averaging about 0.5% growth per year. This increase reflects a gradual shift towards dining out, driven mainly by rising incomes, busier lifestyles, and the growing variety of restaurant, not delivery apps, which weren't yet widespread.

Things took off in the mid-2010s as delivery apps like DoorDash (2013), Uber Eats (2014), and Postmates (2011) gained momentum. Remember those years? It was when Uber, Airbnb all these modern apps became mainstream. By 2015–2017, these services had become a normal part of life, fueled by smartphone ubiquity and gig-economy infrastructure. The pandemic in 2020–2021 further accelerated their growth.

I don’t think it’s stopping.

As Gen Z and millennials replace Baby Boomers, food delivery will keep rising. We stand at the beginning of a long-term transformation in American dining, and unless something fundamentally disrupts the status quo, this shift reveals broader and permanent changes in our society.

Five Observations

This isn’t just about shifting consumer preferences. It’s a fundamental restructuring of one of humanity’s oldest, most essential activities:

1. People Prefer Convenience Over Taste

2. Americans Are Becoming More of an Indoor People

3. Ordering Delivery Alters Our Pricing Calculus

4. Specialization Is Probably Inevitable

5. The Three Apps of the Apocalypse: Dating, Eating, and Gambling

1) People Prefer Convenience over Taste

Restaurant food meant to be cooked and eaten right away. Not anymore. Now the food sits, trapped, suffocating in microplastic containers from Costco. Steam condenses on the lids, dripping back onto once-crispy tempura, turning it to soggy, oil-saturated matter that no one would recognize as Japanese cuisine. The pad thai noodles congeal into a homogenous mass. The side salad wilts, dressing seeping into every leaf, creating a texture reminiscent of wet newspaper. It's objectively 40 percent worse than it would be in the restaurant. Maybe 50 percent.

The delivery apps know this. The restaurants know this. Everyone knows food degrades in transit, but it doesn’t matter, we accept that convenience outweighs quality, that time saved justifies the compromise. It just has to be good enough to eat while watching Netflix on a 85-inch Samsung QLED TV.

There are rumors of innovations. High-tech containers that preserve optimal temperature, dishes engineered specifically for transit, sauces designed to activate upon arrival. DoorDash has filed fourteen patents for “transit-reactive cuisine”, lasagna that completes its final bake en route, ramen noodles whose proteins continue developing mid-drive, desserts with enzyme-triggered sauces transforming molecularly between restaurant and residence. Now that food transit is the norm, expect weird shit coming soon.

Everyone with disposable income has quietly become a minor English lord, catered to by servants.

@stephanyvicx

Hello friends! 😊 Here’s what I cooked for game night dinner. For the starter I prepared a snow pea salad over a carrot garlic puree and t... See more

2) Americans Are Becoming More of an Inside People

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