Does On-demand Delivery Have a Sustainable Future?

The pandemic has doubled the business of the most significant food delivery apps. With the public accustomed to making small orders for speedy delivery, Q-commerce, where items are delivered in as little as 30 minutes, is becoming more prevalent.

Now, retailers, restaurants, takeaways, and even pharmacies offer superfast home delivery products in cities and rural areas. The rapid growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

With more vehicles making these smaller deliveries, more packaging is needed, and more food waste is generated. The question becomes: What are the implications of on-demand delivery for sustainability?

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the following:

• The biggest sustainability challenges for on-demand delivery

• The ways delivery brands and restaurants are tackling these challenges

• The future outlook for sustainability in on-demand delivery

Sustainability Challenges for On-demand Delivery

On-demand delivery of meals, groceries, and medicines is great for the customer and offers the ultimate convenience. Ordering items that will arrive within an hour can help you get out of a tight spot, and it promises to become cheaper and more available in the future.

But, as always, speed and convenience come at a price. In this case, the price is not so much a cash price tag because deliveries are free or charged a small fee. The price is the environmental impact of on-demand delivery.

Smaller, more frequent orders mean more journeys to deliver fewer products, which entails more vehicles on the road, more traffic, and more pollution. This is not to mention the rest of the delivery infrastructure—in terms of warehousing and transport to delivery hubs—that comes with offering superfast last-mile deliveries in towns and cities worldwide.

It can also mean more packaging per item in these smaller orders, with meals and groceries having to be well protected while traveling quickly on a bicycle or motorbike.

The convenience of on-demand delivery makes it a significant contributor to food waste. Although smaller orders of items needed immediately may be better for home food waste than supermarket orders made in advance, surveys show that food delivery has big problems with food waste.

These challenges are significant, but they also point to areas of opportunity. Restaurants and retailers that take on sustainability can make a huge difference. You’ll also be appealing to the consensus that the planet’s health should be a priority for everyone, including businesses. 

Investing in more eco-friendly, sustainable delivery practices could benefit your bottom line as much as it does the well-being of our terrestrial home.

How to Operate More Sustainable On-demand Delivery

How do delivery providers tackle these challenges? Are they motivated to make positive changes? Let’s examine each area to see the future for on-demand delivery.

Cleaner Transport 

On-demand delivery leads to more vehicles on the road delivering smaller orders to customers. However, innovations in delivery vehicle technology are helping to mitigate these effects. 

Smaller orders are delivered within a mile, so smaller, lower-powered vehicles can be used to make deliveries. We already see bicycles, e-bikes, and small mopeds on the roads delivering groceries and meals in cities, and plenty of green options will become more common in the future. 

Electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and practical, and as battery technology improves, e-bike prices are also dropping. Electric motorbikes and scooters have great potential for short-distance deliveries, too.

As the Q-commerce sector grows, delivery models will become more efficient. The number of journeys needed should be reduced, leading to fewer vehicles on the road and lower emissions.

Delivery providers in other sectors are already offering some optimism for the future. In 2020, for example, courier company DHL launched a riverboat parcel delivery arm to reduce road congestion. Each morning, the boat transports parcels into London on the River Thames, where they are then loaded on e-bikes for the final leg of the journey.

Creative solutions like this in food delivery could be key to solving congestion and pollution. In the not-too-distant future, we may even see delivery robots, with Amazon already investing heavily in autonomous delivery drones.

Sustainable Packaging 

One of the biggest areas for improvement in food delivery is its packaging materials. Mind-boggling stats reveal that UK customers who purchase fast food at lunch generate an estimated 11 billion items of packaging waste a year. McDonald’s alone uses 2.8 tonnes of packaging every minute.

Specifically, gains can be made in reducing the amount of single-use plastics and other non-recyclable materials used for deliveries. In fairness to delivery platforms, things have improved in the last decade, with many more restaurants and delivery providers using sustainable packaging and recyclable bags and boxes.

DeliveryHero, for instance, has launched a drive to provide restaurants with 100% plant-based packaging free from harmful plastics. As more delivery companies follow suit, the future promises more eco-friendly delivery containers.

To make your delivery packaging greener, check out our tips and tricks for eco-friendly packaging. 

Reduce Food Waste

There are several ways to tackle food waste in the restaurant and food delivery world.

Technological solutions to stop overproduction occurring and reduce the amount of waste generated. Then, there are ways to use food waste productively, such as using leftovers for staff meals or giving unused food away to the needy.

Restaurants can use smart systems to identify areas to reduce food waste while increasing efficiency. The first step is to plan to quantify the amount of waste generated. Then, you can put measures to limit food waste, such as implementing more structured recipe management and inventory systems to control purchasing, production, and rotation.

Tech platforms' insights can also help restaurants make the right decisions regarding portioning, menu, and order management. To reduce food waste generated by deliveries, read up on how restaurants can utilize food delivery insights to tackle food waste.

Restaurants and delivery providers have several schemes for using food that would otherwise be wasted. You could model these schemes in your operations.

DoorDash launched ProjectDASH in 2018 to match unwanted food with food banks and people in need. The innovative scheme has now delivered more than 6.5 million meals. Glovo’s Head of Social Impact and Sustainability, Sébastien Pellion, recently revealed that the Spanish Q-commerce delivery provider is doing something similar by using logistics partners to collect surplus food and leftovers and donate them to NGOs.

Many major retailers and restaurant brands in the UK, including Morrisons, Pret a Manger, and Yo Sushi, are partnered with the Too Good To Go initiative. This initiative uses a marketplace app to connect surplus food to hungry customers who can buy it at a discounted price.

If restaurants can meaningfully control food waste, there will be less need for programs like this. However, a two-pronged approach promises to minimize the amount of good food that goes to landfills.

Is There a Sustainable Future For On-demand Delivery?

While the environmental impact of food delivery remains a huge challenge, it’s promising to see restaurant brands and food delivery apps taking steps to tackle the sector's biggest sustainability challenges. 

With consumers actively seeking more sustainable ways to obtain food and groceries, forward-thinking food companies have incentives to make the right changes.

Here’s to a greener, more sustainable future for on-demand delivery.