Fueled by the explosion of mobile ordering apps such as DoorDash and UberEats, food delivery sales have grown 20 percent over the last five years, while restaurant traffic has flatlined. That's according to a new study released by the NPD Group, a market research firm that monitored trends in food delivery between 2012 and 2017.
The report's conclusions reinforce the shifting trends in consumer behavior as the ease of online shopping and meal delivery have taken a bigger bite out of retail sales and eating at restaurants.
People are simply staying at home more, whether they're streaming a movie on Netflix instead of heading to a movie theater or supping on a Big Mac and fries on their couch rather than ordering fast food at the drive-thru, said Warren Solochek, NPD's senior vice president of industry relations.
"Delivery has matured a lot," Solochek said. "It used to be the fast-food pizza guys and your local Chinese guy, and in the past five years, there's been this explosion of delivery opportunity because of the third-party aggregators and also because the demand for restaurants has not really grown, so restaurants have had to do something to get people to continue to use their product."
