Among the changes we have experienced in the digital sector over the last two years is the massive adoption of the practice of home food delivery. This is a global phenomenon, and it is expected that by 2025, revenues from the global food delivery market will reach $1.39 billion, according to data from Statista.
Similarly, the report indicates that most of these projected revenues for 2025 will be generated in China (around 499.140 million dollars). Looking ahead, the delivery market is expected to reach revenues of 2.02 billion dollars by 2030. There are more than enough reasons to analyze it in depth.
However, if we take a broader view and review the state of the sector worldwide, we will see that its main players are few… and very powerful.
Delivery Hero is a multinational food delivery company based in Berlin. It was founded in May 2011 by Swedish Niklas Östberg, operates in around 70 countries worldwide, and is associated with over 500,000 restaurants. In addition to delivering groceries, it delivers other types of items such as flowers, pharmaceuticals, etc., to 2.200 billion customers.
In 2021, Delivery Hero acquired 44% of the shares of Glovo, the leader in food delivery in our country. Their paths first crossed in 2018 when Delivery Hero began participating in Glovo’s funding rounds.
And at the beginning of 2022, it announced plans to acquire most of the company. The purchase was completed in the summer of that year after the turbulence caused by Glovo’s experienced issues. Finally, Delivery Hero acquired 94% of Glovo for less than 8 billion dollars, a significantly lower amount than the 2.3 million initially agreed upon.
According to the latest company report for the first quarter of 2025, Delivery Hero recorded revenues of 3.5 billion dollars, representing a 22% increase over the same period in 2024. And, although it also increased its GMV by 9% to 12.4 billion dollars, the delivery giant is still in the process of stabilizing on the path to profitability, something not made easier by the numerous fines and sanctions it accumulates.
Delivery Hero is one of the drivers of the concept of Quick Commerce (q-commerce), a new way of delivering items to the home in which items are delivered almost instantly where and when consumers need them. For example, Delivery Hero delivers items in half an hour, or even less time.
However, both companies, Glovo and Delivery Hero are facing a a fine in the EU. We explain you why in this article.
In 2020, the Anglo-Dutch firm Just Eat TakeAway became the second giant in home food delivery by purchasing Grubhub for 7.06 billion dollars. Before that, in August 2019, it had already merged with its British rival JustEat, forming one of the major food delivery groups worldwide.
The leading food delivery company, which began back in 2000, seeks to distance itself from the controversies plaguing some of its competitors like Glovo. To achieve this differentiation, it implemented a new business model, Scoober, based on its own network of contract-employed couriers, as opposed to the “riders” of other platforms like Glovo or Deliveroo who operated as freelancers before the Rider Law.
In February 2025, it was announced that the tech company and global investment group Prosus reached an agreement with Just Eat TakeAway to acquire it for 4.1 billion euros. The purpose of this acquisition by Prosus is to create the fourth-largest food delivery group in the world.
Founded in 2012, it has been owned by Delivery Hero since December 2016. In Spain, it is not well known, but Food Panda operates in 11 markets in Asia, particularly popular primarily in the Asia–Pacific region. Among other things, it predominantly dominates in countries like Pakistan.
The service offered allows users to select local restaurants and place orders through their mobile applications and websites. The company has partnered with more than 115,000 restaurants in over 400 cities and works with over 7,000 employees.
Uber Eats was launched in 2014 as an experiment. At that time, its then-CEO Travis Kalanick wanted to expand Uber’s reach with new forms of transportation. He created Uber Fresh, as it was initially called, and used Uber’s extensive network of vehicles to make deliveries. This resulted in rapid growth. Uber Fresh started by delivering fixed-price menus to people in Santa Monica, California, and within a year, Uber Eats was already available in Barcelona, New York, and Chicago.
In 2020, after Just Eat Takeaway took GrubHub away, Uber acquired another major food delivery company, Postmates, in a new attempt to consolidate itself in the market and boost its profitability. Although Uber Eats was able to grow significantly during the pandemic, it still has a way to go to achieve good profitability figures. Its current CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, commented that they expected it to be profitable in 2022.
In May 2022, Uber Eats added the burger chain Five Guys to its offerings in a beneficial agreement for both parties, which sought to respond to numerous requests from its users, as confirmed by Uber Eats’ General Manager in Spain, Courtney Tim’s.
Currently, Uber Eats is present in 30 countries and, in Spain alone, in over 500 cities.
As we mentioned earlier, the Spanish firm founded in 2014 by Oscar Pierre is one of the pioneers of instant delivery Q-Commerce and one of the most popular home delivery platforms in our country, as well as having a presence in other markets. Today, Glovo is present in over 1,500 cities and 23 countries.
The year 2020 was not a bright year for Glovo. To increase its profitability, it announced the sale of its Latin American businesses to Delivery Hero for 230 million dollars to focus, on the other hand, on the European and Asian markets. As with Just Eat Takeaway, Glovo has struggled to generate profits since its inception.
However, at the time of completing the transaction, Delivery Hero had to pay 450 million dollars due to the economic landscape Glovo presented. The home delivery company closed its fiscal year 2021 with a deficit and losses five times greater than the previous year (474 million dollars).
On the other hand, Glovo’s revenues increased by 60% in the fiscal year 2021 compared to the previous year, rising from almost 360 million to 580. However, this was not enough to achieve good results. Its losses skyrocketed from 83 million dollars to 474 million.
Additionally, its name has been too closely associated with controversy due to the precarious employment situation of its “riders”. While Glovo considers couriers to be autonomous, many others (including employees) see these workers as a clear case of false self-employment, where the company avoids the costs of having them on staff.
This scenario has been stabilizing somewhat thanks to the Rider Law, although Glovo announced changes in its billing system to detach from the delivery service. The company has continued to face fines for violating this law. After receiving a fine of 57 million in January 2023, Glovo announced the dismissal of 250 employees at the end of that same month.
In February 2024, Glovo received a new penalty for violating its couriers’ privacy and failing to protect their information. The fine amounted to 550,000 dollars and it was imposed by the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD). Later that year, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation against Glovo and Delivery Hero.
During 2021, names like Gorillas, Getir, or GoPuff began to make a strong impression in the delivery landscape: these companies aimed to unseat their predecessors, and their strategy relied on offers, discounts, and promises of faster deliveries to their customers, with the concept of “ultra-fast deliveries.” However, this race is expensive at the beginning, and not all of them managed to handle this successfully.
Indeed, the profitability of these companies hangs by a thread in their early stages; their strategy is to establish a foothold in the market and then raise prices, withdrawing the aggressive nature of their offers, which begin to yield actual profits.
According to a study by consulting firm Bain & Company, the minimum order price needs to be 30 euros for these new ultra-fast delivery companies to achieve profitability. However, reality differs from this figure, as the average order price is about 20 euros. It would also be necessary to reach a volume of orders through dark stores (ghost supermarkets, located in city centers from which items are dispatched) of over 1,000 daily per warehouse, a figure that also falls short of the current situation.
In March 2022, the Turkish company Getir took its start-up environment to the next level, becoming a “decacorn” after raising 700 million euros in a funding round. At that time, its valuation stood at over 10 billion euros. Several months later, in December, it acquired its competitor, the German Gorillas through an agreement valuing it at 1.2 million euros.
Getir’s founder, Nazim Salur, used a metaphor to describe the situation the delivery sector companies face, saying that his company was like an airplane taking off that needed much fuel to take off but, once in the air, would reach cruising speed and stabilize. However, it seems its flight has encountered severe turbulence.
In May 2022, Getir conducted a 14% global workforce reduction, dismissing 4,500 people, which also affected its situation in Spain. Among the upcoming changes the company faced were the need to reduce much of its capital-intensive expansion, limiting hiring, marketing investments, and promotional offerings. According to various sources, at that time, the company was reportedly spending around 60 million dollars per month, potentially reaching an expenditure of 1 billion dollars in 2022.
The turbulence continued, and in August 2022, Getir made further layoffs. In relation to Spain, these affected more than 35 workers and were accompanied by the closure of 20 dark stores. Finally, in the summer of 2023, Getir permanently exited Spain.
In 2023, the company raised a 500 million dollar round led by the Emirati fund Mubadala, although its valuation fell by 45% compared to the valuation assigned to it when it closed its previous round in 2022, falling to around 6.5 billion dollars.
At the end of April 2024, Getir announced it would exit Europe and the U.S. to focus exclusively on its home market: Turkey. At that time, its country of origin accounted for 90% of its current business volume, making it evident that its presence in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. was not yielding the expected results.
This German company is just four years old but is one of the European startups that quickly achieved unicorn status. As mentioned, it was acquired by Getir in 2022.
The purchase took place after a rough period for Gorillas. In mid-2022, it announced a mass layoff, cutting 50% of its workforce in Berlin (about 320 employees), as well as its exit from the markets of Spain, Belgium, Italy, and Denmark. The sector’s aggressive business model turned Gorillas into a money-burning machine, and the situation was no longer sustainable.
Founded in 2015 in the U.S., in the summer of 2021, it was valued at 15 billion dollars. In August 2021, GoPuff acquired the British delivery platform Dija, and in February 2022, it officially launched in Madrid.
Shortly after arriving in Spain, GoPuff announced the dismissal of 3% of its global workforce (over 400 people). Indeed, amidst its expansion plans across Spain, it is noted that the company had spent 500 million dollars in 2021 alone. In terms of financing, it raised 2.2 billion dollars that same year in two rounds.
Later, in mid-July 2022, the company again made a global staff cut, dismissing 10%. Finally, in August, it announced its exit from Spain just six months after arriving.
The most downloaded food delivery apps in Spain
Now that we know the major players in the global delivery scene, their trajectories, and situations, let us delve deeper into what reality they present in the Spanish context. From data obtained from the Data.ai portal from last April, among the apps in the “food and drink” category with the most monthly active users, we find food delivery companies Uber Eats and Just Eat. The complete ranking is as follows:
Similarly, this list includes applications from restaurant franchises (McDonald’s, Burger King, or KFC, for example), food surplus apps (Too Good To Go), or restaurant management apps (TheFork). Even the Aquaservice home delivery service appears.
On the other hand, if we filter the list of food and drink apps most downloaded during last April, we find the delivery app Uber Eats in second place and Just Eat in sixth.
In China, the food delivery sector is dominated by two major companies: Meituan and Ele.me. As indicated by the history of Alibaba, the latter is owned by the eCommerce giant since 2018, while Meituan is controlled by its major rival in Asian eCommerce: Tencent.
Despite forming a de facto duopoly, Meituan’s power is somewhat greater than Ele.me’s. According to Statista, in September 2024, the former had no fewer than 83 million monthly active users, while the latter boasted an enviable 73 million.
Photo: Depositphotos
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