Online restaurant meal ordering and delivery continues to be a hot trend with Canadians. Driven by technology and convenience, its popularity started to accelerate about nine years ago with the launch of a small Canadian company from Saskatoon called SkipTheDishes. Based on a simple premise of offering independent restaurants a direct solution (or enhancing an existing) delivery service, while at the same time creating an online marketplace for consumers to shop restaurant food to be delivered, SkipTheDishes went on to define the newly developed third-party-aggregator modelin Canada and has successfully becomethe dominant leader in providing online restaurant meal shopping and delivery tomillions of Canadians each year. And, according to market-share data from Unified Data, SkipTheDishes continues to be the leader in this segment in 2021.
In 2019, Canadians spent an estimated $6 billion on online restaurant ordering and delivery and the country now ranks among the top-five countries globally for per capita usage of online restaurant-delivery services. As a result, online ordering and delivery has been the fastest area of growth in the Canadian restaurant segment, outpacing all other areas of opportunities for restaurants. And the battle for consumer dollars is heating up in a segment dominated by just three key players — SkipTheDishes, Uber Eats and DoorDash. The dominance of these three players has accelerated during the pandemic as all three food-delivery companies scrambled to sign on new restaurants. According to Unified Data, a record number of Canadian restaurants in 2021 now offer online ordering with direct delivery to consumers thanks to SkipTheDishes, Uber and Doordash, which combined, provide services to an estimated 50,000 restaurants across Canada.
And the trend of restaurants signing on to the big three online-ordering platforms is not slowing down. According to Unified Data, in the past six months, an average of 1,000 restaurants a month have signed on to one of these companies. SkipTheDishes is leading the way, capturing the largest share of those new restaurant sign-ups by onboarding approximately 354 new restaurants a month since March 2021. In second spot, DoorDash is averaging 330 new restaurants a month. Uber Eats was slower to onboard new restaurants compared to its competitors over the past six months, averaging approximately 311 new restaurants a month.
Online ordering of restaurant meals for direct delivery is now a foundation of today’s restaurant business model and it’s very possible that within the next few years, every restaurant unit in Canada will be part of an outsourced delivery service provided by the big three.
By Robert Carter
