How Millennials Are Using Food Delivery Apps

If you have been paying attention to the changes in the food market, you will have noticed that a growing number of people, particularly the younger generation, or Millennials, are increasingly ordering food from food delivery services, rather than going to restaurants or cooking at home.

This trend is most obvious with apps like Uber Eats, which now has more restaurants and food services than you could ever need. It seems like food delivery might take over the old way of cooking and eating at restaurants, and for the most part, this trend is being pushed by millennials.

Food delivery apps are causing such a huge disruption to the conventional food market that entire food chains have lost business and had to put billions of dollars into this service just to stay afloat. In fact, the hangers brought on by food ordering services are comparable to what Uber did in the taxi segment – basically turning the industry on its head, with the most benefit going to consumers.

Of course, the food businesses are also making money as more people opt to eat at home, but one wonders how this trend is going to change the way we handle food or our attitudes toward cooking.

For the most part, everybody who uses services such as Uber Eats finds it a major convenience, and because of this, we’re continually seeing an increase in the number of restaurants and food chains listed onto the service.

There is actually a belief that in the next 20 years, the food market as we know it will be non-existent. Consider a scenario where robots are used in massive kitchens to flip burgers, and drones are used to deliver the food to customers everywhere; this is actually happening on a smaller scale, if only for the sake of experimentation.

When it gets to a point where food production on this scale becomes cheaper than cooking at home, (and of course, as long as the health factors are looked into) it’s likely that customers will increase their reliance on food delivery services.

It’s mot even difficult y conceive of this idea. We already know that robots are being delivered for the purposes of streamlining services so that our basic principles of production will involve zero downtime and a massive increase in productivity, so it’s only matter of time before we see industries such as the food market implementing these technologies to make these services more easily accessible and affordable to the majority of consumers.

If this continues, we could see homes being built without kitchens, or maybe with much smaller kitchens than what we’re currently used to. But this is still some ways off.

In the meantime, we’re seeing an increasing dependency on food apps as a way for millennials to access food services, and this is likely to continue for a while, before we see a whole shift in consumer habits.

The older folk (and indeed some younger ones too) are still holding onto the idea of shopping as a physical process that requires visiting a brick-and-mortar store, with the usual interaction and some casual banter with the locals. Some people cringe at the idea of shopping the traditional way, and this involves buying food or any other item.

For now, the affordability of restaurant food delivery services makes it a convenience for consumers but this trend could develop in different ways than what some experts anticipate.

According to some of the studies being circulated in regard to millennials and food delivery, a good number of younger consumers want to have an experience with every meal, and whether that involves ordering in, and “doctoring up” their food to call it homemade, it doesn’t really matter to them as long as they have their way.

It’s interesting how millennials (described as adults aged between 21 and 36) describe their experience with food – there’s obviously an awareness of the health implications of eating bad food, an a genuine effort to include whole meals in their food serving. But at the same time, the majority don’t want to cook, but they do want to play a role in the preparation; so that’s where they use food ordering services and do their own mash up to add a personal touch to the end product.

Millennials may have been the first large demographic to really embrace this service, but for the most part, the dynamics of food preparation appear to be driven by that same innate desire to share food that we’ve prepared ourselves, so that meal time with family or friends can be more personal.

At the moment, food delivery services reduce the time needed to prepare the food, and even though some of the services are pricey, it seems that for this generation, time is certainly the more valuable commodity.