About the efficiencies of on-demand deliveries

Doordash Investor presentation 10.11.2021

The big news of the day was the Doordash acquisition of Wolt. For a company of a size of Doordash it makes a whole lot of sense to buy a small player from Europe to start building a foothold to the continent.

One of the arguments for the acquisition was Wolf’s logistical efficiency. This is a topic that has been of great interest as the on-demand courier companies have not been sharing too much information about their efficiencies.

However, the Doordash investor presentation sheds some light on Wolf’s efficiency. The traditional online grocery measure of deliveries per hour has improved for Wolt over the last years, but it is still on a rather low level. This is somewhat similar to the numbers Ocado has been publishing. One has to note that Ocado operates on a totally opposite business model with huge warehouses on the outskirts of the urban areas.

For an efficient online grocer 4-5 deliveries per hour is a good level.

For a small delivery area with high volumes the numbers can go even higher. Thus, one could say that the on-demand model is not more efficient to the traditional online grocery model.