DoorDash and Uber Eats are now ordinary parts of city life, which makes it easy to forget how quickly app-based food delivery became a major industry.
We want to build a clean, sourced history of the two companies’ delivery businesses: where they started, how they expanded, the markets they serve, the scale of orders and revenue they report, and what can actually be known about the workforce carrying those orders. Public company numbers do not always translate neatly into “how many active drivers are there,” so we will be careful about definitions.
The story will also look at the business model from the three sides that matter most—customer, merchant and driver. Growth that looks spectacular in an investor presentation can feel very different to a restaurant paying commissions or a driver calculating net earnings after vehicle costs.
This is intended as a reference article for later SOAPSzone reporting: a factual map of the two dominant platforms before we start arguing about particular features, policies and failures.
