25 Jul 2024 Price and placement promotions on Meal Delivery Apps: Food Active insight work
New research from Food Active explores the way in which food and drinks are promoted by price and place on Meal Delivery Apps, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat.
Meal delivery applications (MDAs), such as Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats are a key player in today’s food system – the UK is the third largest online food delivery market. MDAs offer consumers convenient access to a wide range of food and drink, but food prepared out of home (OOH) is generally energy-dense and high in fat, salt and/or sugar and concerns are growing about the role the sector and MDAs are playing in shaping the nation’s diet.
Following consultation with the Food Active North West local authority network, Food Active carried out some initial insight work to better understand the availability of healthier options on MDAs, as well as how food is marketed on these apps by price and place.
The research, representing data from 180 outlets in two postcodes of Liverpool and collected from the three leading Meal Delivery Apps (MDA, Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat), found that less healthy food items are in the spotlight of MDAs, often placed at the top of menus, and price promotions are frequently used by restaurants, fast food outlets and takeaways, specifically utilising volume-based discounts and offering free delivery. This is an area that has not been explored extensively in a UK context and provides further insight into how less healthy food and drinks are in the spotlight to consumers across the system, and we have highlighted how MDAs and the out of home (OOH) sector are manipulating price and place promotions in order to do this.
The research also explored the availability of healthier options on MDAs, which collected data on the tags each food and drink outlet use to describe their food offer. From the 180 outlets included in this piece of insight work, just 17% were tagged as ‘healthy’. However, it is unclear how this ‘healthy’ criteria is defined by the MDAs, as some of the outlets which were tagged as ‘healthy’ were not typically associated with healthier options (i.e. Subway, independent doner kebab restaurants).
Finally, the research also sought to identify any potential ‘dark kitchens’ in this sample of OOH outlets as this is a growing area of interest within the public health community. Whilst there is no gold standard measure beyond visiting the outlet in person, we adapted Huang et al. (2023) methodology which focuses on outlets offering collection only, multiple businesses operating out of one unit and/or may be operating out of an industrial unit. Using this approach, 9% of the total sample were identified as potential dark kitchens.
The report is concluded with a series of recommendations for national government, local government, MDAs and research. The recommendations at a glance are below, however the full set can be viewed on page 29 of the report.
- National government: Ensure existing legislation which restricts the promotion of less healthy food and drink at key locations in-store and online (grocery and supermarket sector) extends to the OOH sector.
- Local government: Take a whole systems approach to promote healthier weight and improve the local food environment by adopting the Local Authority Declaration on Healthy Weight; working with the local food and drink sector to encourage them to take steps to improve their menu and offer healthier options.
- MDAs: Consider how consumers can be better informed about the healthiness of the foods available on MDAs; adopt a uniform system to assess the healthiness of the food and drink offer, for example the ‘Health Rating Score’, to enable customers to find healthier options and place healthier food and drinks in the spotlight, including at the top of menus and move away from applying volume-based promotions.
- Research: Replicate this research on a greater scale, to include a larger number of outlets on MDAs and in several parts of the UK to understand the picture at a national level.
Read the report here!
Beth Bradshaw ANutr., Food Active Policy and Advocacy Manager said:
“MDAs are a convenient, popular and accessible way to access a wide range of cuisines simply at the tap of a button and have established themselves as a key player in how we as consumers buy and consume foods.
Given the important role they play, and in the context of the rising levels of diet-related disease, it is pertinent to consider how both MDAs and the OOH sector can be improved to better support healthier choices.
The way foods are promoted on MDAs is currently an under-researched area within a UK context, and we hope these initial findings can help to provide direction and scope for larger scale, academic studies to strengthen the evidence base and case for policy change.”
If you would like to find out more about this research, please email info@foodactive.org.uk
We would like to thank Myra Doherty for her assistance in collecting data for this piece of research.
