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Which food delivery app, in your opinion, is the best?
I'm downloading a lot of apps rn, and I'm wondering which food delivery app I should get/use.
What would you recommend, and why?
I'm downloading a lot of apps rn, and I'm wondering which food delivery app I should get/use.
What would you recommend, and why?
You'll need to mention country, at least, to get a good response - but really it varies pretty heavily by city as well.
All of the apps I've used have been more or less similar in terms of being decently quick, easy, and moderately reliable (but far from perfect on that last count); they also all gouge both restaurants and customers as far as the local market will bear, and treat their "independent contractors" based on whatever the law will tolerate in any given place.
On that basis, it comes down to who's offering the best promotions and who's got the best selection of restaurants - both of which are pretty much going to come down to where you're looking to use them.
Sorry, I should've mentioned I'm on the east coast of the USA.
I'm gonna add to the tide of "only order from places that have their own delivery". It just doesn't sit right with me to pay so much extra for an app delivery when I know basically none of that makes it to the drivers (a few years back I drove for OrderUp, GrubHub, and Postmates, as well as Instacart, till I got out of a shit situation). Unfortunately for me, there's only one place near me who has their own drivers. They are, however, a combination Greek, Italian, and Indian place, so they have a wide enough menu to make it tolerable.
I use Doordash only because they run a lot of promos / discounts, as well as discounted gift cards from various retailers. Otherwise, they all seem to be about the same.
Same here but with Uber Eats. About once a year I get en email asking me to come back and offering 50% off my order after any restaurant specific deals.
Which isn't incredible, but it still, after tipping the driver and everything, is cheaper than if I went to do takeout.
And that's literally the only time I'll ever order delivery.
Uber Eats has been the most reliable for me by far. I've ordered quite a lot, and I don't think I've ever not gotten food ordered on Uber Eats. Sometimes, delivery instructions are ignored, so my food will be at a different door, but it's always made it, usually on time.
I rarely even roll the dice with Door Dash and GrubHub anymore because, far too often, the food just doesn't arrive and I have to start over. I don't understand how those apps can stay in business.
To be clear, all of them are bad. They increase the food prices and then hide their fees in a line item called "taxes and fees," implying they are not being charged by the app. That's just what they do to consumers. They've been caught setting up fake phone numbers and web sites masquerading as restaurants to intercept food orders so they can play middleman. Uber Eats does seem to at least get the food to you though.
Wooooow, the fake numbers and restaurants. I mean, just make an actual restaurant at that point lol. But okay, I think I'll get Uber Eats, but use it as a last resort if a restaurant doesn't do delivery. Ty!
Good luck! I was a little unclear on one point, I think. What they've been caught doing is setting up web sites that masquerade as established restaurants' web sites, taking orders and offering phone numbers that call directly to them so that they can insert themselves in the transaction. It's dirty business!
I find them all about the same, at least in Canada. In my opinion, the most important factor is which app has the most restaurants you want, especially if you're trying to avoid downloading them all.
We have generally settled on Uber Eats mostly due to this combined with Uber One being a decent value if you order a couple times a month and fine that we get more coupons/offers on Uber but YMMV.
I will still occasionally end up downloading Skip or Doordash if the place we want to order from is only on that app.
Ty! I'll consider those options, too.
Honestly I have all of them, but don't like any of them. I use Grubhub mostly because my work provides free credits from them, and my credit card gives 5$ a month for Doordash. Having all of them you get the benefit of taking advantage of the rotating discounts some of them give.
Every time I open an app like Doordash or Grubhub, I tend to just make food at home. I have a few problems with them. One being the overwhelming amount of choices, and the fact that I personally feel I can always trust what the reviews or recommendations in the apps are telling me. I haven’t had many good experiences. Like others have commented, the food sits for a while and is always worse quality than what you intend to purchase. I think they are helpful to order food for pickup, but then why not just go directly through the restaurant. Our local pizza place delivery is always faster and cheaper when i call, as opposed to ordering through an app. I recognize everyone has different circumstances, but more recently than every I feel regret from using these services!
If you call into those restaurants for pickup they may actually offer you a better price because they aren’t having to pay a middleman.
The difficulty is the vast majority of places on the apps (here in London, at least) just didn’t offer delivery at all previously - and a decent number of that small subset who previously did now just outsource it to Deliveroo or Uber Eats.
Problem is the apps came with a genuine innovation but didn’t consider that to be profitable enough on its own. A centralised pool of delivery drivers to be shared by all restaurants is way more efficient and flexible than having a few places employ dedicated drivers and the rest having nothing - but the apps’ actual business model is essentially marketing (be on our app and pay our fees or nobody will ever find you) rather than delivery.
My apologies, I meant to specify to call for pickup. I don’t know any restaurants that do app delivery plus their own delivery service, except maybe a few pizza places.
Ah, that makes sense! I kind of think of the apps as being synonymous with delivery orders, likely because most people around here don’t own cars, but that’s definitely my bubble more than the wider norm.
Deliveroo seems to let restaurants use their own drivers if they want, so it’s not too uncommon to see here, but the significant majority definitely just let the app handle it all. Makes for a strong skew towards apps as the default - which is absolutely what the companies making them are trying to engineer, of course!
I use the Amazon Alexa app, and it goes something like this:
"Alexa! Announce!"
"What would you like to announce?"
"Honey, what time is dinner?"
Bing-BING "From Geekphreek: 'Honey, what time is dinner?"
Mumbles from a distant part of the house...
Bing-BING "From wife: 'What?!'
And that goes on for a bit until one of us makes dinner for the whole family. We both work from home, so it's a daily battle.
I have no idea if one is in your location, but I like Clean Eatz for having food on hand that you can grab, heat and eat, and you can throw some in the freezer if you find one you like for that week.
https://locations.cleaneatz.com/
Additionally, Factor 75 is supposed to be good for healthy, readymade meals mailed to you.
This sounds perfect! There's a couple only 30 mins from me. I'm going to bookmark this :)
None.
My experience with these delivery apps have generally been extremely poor. The vast majority of options are fast food restaurants. The added expense can be astronomical - meals can double in price pretty easily. And the quality of service can vary wildly. I’ve had meals that were late by over an hour. I’ve had deliveries placed right by my door so it got knocked over when I opened the door to get it. And I have even had a meal that was mysteriously light on food. Overall the service is fairly poor across all of them. And the crown on top of all of this is that the food you get will be drammatcially worse because it spends a long time just sitting around, so it comes cold and sometimes soggy.
If you are stuck somewhere and can’t leave to eat your lunch for whatever reason, I would personally recommend to try to skip the meal rather than use one of these services.
I've never understood the appeal. I mean, I know the appeal, instant gratification, but the price is way too high. If I want something delivered I'll order chinese/pizza instead of paying the same or more for a combo from a fastfood place, and more for anywhere good. The "Ghost Kitchen" thing is crazy too. Knowing where your food is from seems like the absolute bare minimum for a restaurant delivery app.
Was sitting at the bar of a place near me and a regular came into the restaurant with his doordash(?) order half empty. They're pretty generous on the portions, his big thing was someone who didn't know what it was supposed to contain would've thought they was just skimpy/average and stop giving the restaurant business.
Delivery apps treat their "contractors" so poorly that they're encouraged to skim off the food they're delivering. I remember it being bad 20 years ago when you worked fast food and could only afford to eat at the restaurant you worked at, and they managed to make that worse. Now you have to maintain your car, and you're not guaranteed even minimum wage. Why would I support that over "traditional" delivery?
This is exactly why location is a big part of this question - low density US suburbs where everyone drives? Yeah, a lot of the time it wouldn’t be significantly harder to go yourself, and the selection in range probably isn’t going to be too exciting a lot of the time.
Dense mega city where the alternative would be public transport? There are 1,000+ options on the list across all cuisines and price points, and it’s hugely more convenient to have it just turn up at the door than do a 40 minute round trip just to pick up some ramen.
For me it was actually the opposite - when I lived in a less densely populated area I found myself using services more because it was so much work to get in my car, drive somewhere, pay, bring it back, eat, then feel like shit.
In a more populated area, I find myself willing to walk 20 minutes to a restaurant, eat, then walk back - and the pleasant thing is that I've also gotten an opportunity to walk in while doing it.
To be fair to the ghost kitchen concept, every delivery app I've seen will tell you the address of where it's coming from.
On the other hand, the whole virtual restaurant concept seems to be faltering lately as there appear to be many complaints about quality, accuracy, and consistency. You can look into the whole drama around Mr. Beast Burger for an example.
That skimpy order I mentioned earlier was through DoorDash, and I did nothing about it but fume because anything I could do would make the situation worse. I didn't want to be the person who gave the complaint that stopped the delivery person from being able to work with them anymore - they obviously must be struggling if they are stealing food. And what would DoorDash do to make it better? Send someone out to get me the same order again? It took more than an hour to get what I got, and I had to eat something at that point because I was sick and hadn't eaten much at all that day, so I was starving; redelivering it would just mean I would have more food to gorge on.
I feel like finding an address and then researching it on Google Maps to make sure it's real is pretty ridiculous. No one should have to do detective work to find out if the place they're ordering from is "real."
It’s really surprising me just how different most people’s experiences/concerns here seem to my own. If I’m ordering from somewhere I’ve either tried it before and I know what to expect, or I haven’t and I’m going on reviews - neither of those are impacted at all by whether it’s made in a kitchen with a front of house attached or one in a warehouse that just hands off to delivery drivers. Genuinely not seeing the difference a ghost kitchen makes?
Virtual brands are trickier just because they clog up the search results a bit, and consistency does seem lower, but even then I could say the same of any of the physical, public facing options that I just haven’t tried yet: reviews are a decent guideline, you might still hit a dud once in a while, that’s the chance you’re taking trying somewhere new for the first time.
Its less about the physical implementation for me, and more about deception. If someone creates a completely new restaurant that is only-online and has a kitchen in an unmarked building - no issues there. If I see a restaurant that specializes in wings, then I'm going to maybe consider them for their specialty if I'm hungry for wings. But in reality, that company is just Chili's - who has created multiple fake storefronts that each specialize in a different food, but in reality are just different sections of the Chili's menu...that is disingenuous and really offputting.
That totally makes sense, and I guess it’ll be another one that varies by market - and by terminology, to be honest, because “ghost kitchen” and “virtual brand” tend to be used interchangeably a lot of the time even though there’s a pretty wide spectrum of possible meanings.
I see loads of places that are using delivery-only kitchens, often just to avoid the delivery orders clogging up their public facing locations - those are ghost kitchens, to me. Just a restaurant location that isn’t directly customer facing.
Then there are the companies that give additional one-click online presence to small independent takeaways - they’ll sell them software and brand assets, give menus and recipe guidelines, and leave the existing place to figure out how to make that work with their existing kitchen/staff/suppliers. Franchising the branding while using existing resources - which isn’t inherently a terrible idea, at its core, although it tends to be used to give one location four or five bites at the apple in search results, which gets annoying. Variable quality at best, verging on the dishonest, but not really any more uncertain than trying a new independent pizza or fried chicken place in general, at least. That’s firmly in virtual brand territory as I understand it.
I haven’t seen more than one or two attempts by major chains to run virtual brands, although I understand it’s way more common in the US. If it’s literally chunks of the same menu and ingredients under another name then yeah, I’d 100% be pissed off at the deception there.
I don't understand what the problem is. It's made in a commercial kitchen just like any restaurant, these ones just don't have dining rooms. It's not like they're going to a food warehouse and
The mystery quality and consistency is another thing altogether, but from your perspective, that would apply to any place you've never been to.
Usually I'll end up not eating for so long my stomach is hurting, so I'm trying to figure out ways to help myself. I know my depression won't let me cook over ordering food online if there's a choice, so that's why I was asking.
But double the price, drivers eating my food, and late deliveries... it's not looking as ...appetizing. lol.
I ate a lot of delivery food during some of my tougher mental health times. It’s part of the reason I’m kind of all over this thread - lots of firsthand experience - although thankfully things are significantly better nowadays and I still enjoy having a ton of options at my fingertips, just as an occasional treat rather than a regular necessity.
In my experience when things are too fucked up, the right choice is to lean on any support you can. If that means cooking and washing the dishes gets replaced by delivery (and you can do so without totally fucking the budget), that’s some chunk of extra energy to spend on getting better and that’s a win as far as I’m concerned. Admittedly an expensive win that also left me with a lot of excess weight to shed, but still the right trade off to make.
If the drawbacks are enough to kick you into cheaper/healthier habits and you’re in a place that you can handle that, awesome! If you’re not, fuck it, get the delivery for now and give yourself the headspace to focus on sorting what you need to sort; meal prep can come later.
Thank you. Someone had left a malicious comment earlier, so this definitely made up for it. Good to know I'm not the first person going through this.
I don't have enough experience to recommend any food delivery service in particular, but I've been in your position plenty of times.
I can recommend adjusting your grocery habits. Lean into canned or otherwise shelf-stable and precooked meats, like sardines or tuna. Pick up some nuts, some dried fruit, and high-quality meal replacement bars or shakes if you can afford them. The number of days that I've had to force a handful of nuts down my own gullet every few hours and eat a piece-of-fruit dinner is big enough that I might've been dead without those preparations. Of course, canned and frozen veggies are great too, but they're less calorically dense and take an amount of preparation in most cases, and it's important not to pretend that you'll "just cook if you're hungry enough".
There's also the whole world of meal prep, if your motivation issues are more periodic. Stews, curries, oatmeal, salads, there are a ton of options that take less than an hour of concerted effort to prepare 7+ meals that'll stay delicious for a week.
Like Greg said though, don't beat yourself up if you just can't. Order some food, it's better to overspend and get frustrated at some jag who stole a bite than to go to bed hungry.
There are actually “steam in bag” frozen veggies you can buy that take out all effort (though to be frank the only step you are skipping is putting it on a covered plate).
Sometimes, even using the microwave seems like a waste of energy. You're right though, those are great options.
Okay, thank you. I probably can do meal prep (I forgot that's a thing) because I tend to feel pretty energetic and productive when I take my Adderall.
Canned food sounds good, too. I actually like canned peas to the frozen ones, and I also enjoy chicken noodle soup ofc. Canned corn is another. I should always have peanut butter on hand I suppose, because peanut butter and Ritz crackers are really good (with a drink). Breakfast shakes, bars, and single serving cereal bowls would be good. Idk if I can stomach protein bars, though. One time, I was in my depressed "haven't showered and so I can't go see anyone" mode, and we had cat customers over to look at some kittens (we breed Siamese). I had no food, and I'd let myself go hungry the night before, slept late, and so my stomach was hurting. From then on I tried to have at least something in my room I can eat, and one of the items I chose was a protein peanut butter cookie. It was disgusting. For some reason, it was sour. Idk if that's how protein stuff tastes, but I can't do that again lol.
When I was in my first year of college I ate a lot of frozen stuff, and one time I didn't realize I was out of everything, and so I ended up trying to eat a ketchup and cheese sandwich. It was so horrible that I think felt a new emotion lol. But that awful emotion of anger, self-pity, and disgust motivated me to confront my social anxiety and cross the street to go to the cafeteria. Looking back on it now, it seems so silly. But I know that in the moment, it was very daunting. I was far from home, with at least an hour between me and anyone I knew, and it was late at night which statistically is when most crimes happen. And college kids are pretty... rowdy, especially if they're drunk or on drugs.
Good luck! In my experience, whey protein can often be unpalatably sour. Other sources might be better in that regard, but I wouldn't really know aside from peanut and soy, which definitely are. Peanut butter is crucial, absolutely, and my favorite "protein" bars are nut based. That kind of just sounds like a not-great cookie.
It is sort of silly, but yeah. All we've really got are our senses and thoughts, so of course it's awful when you're starving on top of other sources of disordered thinking! The brain's running on fumes, there's probably some acute stressor on top of chronic issues when things get that bad, the nausea makes even the prospect of food seem toxic...
I'm definitely grateful that my school was full of socially awkward nerds. Can't even imagine having to brave the usual college crowd for every meal... Even those hallucinating madly kept to themselves during dinner.
Especially irksome to me is the pricing. Sometimes, the base price of an item will be 40% higher than if you walked in the door, and then there's the delivery fee, processing fee, tip for the driver. It's deceptive enough that if you're not paying attention, you might think you only paid the extra $4 delivery fee.
Phoning the restaurant and picking it up in person
This is the way.