How much is the global food delivery market worth each year?

How to get close to this number

Read the question rather than the slug: it asks the global market size. Take the number of people using delivery apps regularly — a few hundred million — and multiply by a few hundred dollars of orders a year each. That gives a figure in the low hundreds of billions.

The profitability point in the explanation is the structural one: almost none of the major platforms has ever turned a sustained profit. A market of this size that consistently loses money is unusual, and it means the price customers pay is below the true cost of the service, subsidised by investors.

The economics are brutal for a simple reason: a courier carries one meal at a time. Almost every other logistics business gains efficiency by consolidating deliveries, and this one cannot, because the product goes cold. A business with no route density and no economies of scale in its core operation is structurally hard to make profitable at any volume.