Food delivery and quick commerce are the apps that bring cooked food from restaurants, and groceries from small warehouses near your home, to your door within minutes. Food usually arrives within 30 to 45 minutes. Quick commerce is the name for the second kind: groceries and household items delivered in about ten minutes.
Here is a typical case. It is eleven at night in your flat in Bengaluru. You order chicken biryani on a food delivery app, and it arrives half an hour later from a kitchen across town. Then you notice that there is no milk for the morning tea. You open a quick commerce app and order milk and bread. They arrive in ten minutes, from a dark store about a kilometre away. A dark store is a small warehouse inside a neighbourhood, stocked like a grocery shop, that no customer ever enters.
Both orders look simple on your phone. But the software behind them must do three hard jobs. First, it must predict what will be ordered. The milk must already be in the dark store before you order it, so the app forecasts each store's sales hour by hour. This is called demand forecasting. Second, it must assign a delivery rider to each order and plan the route, for thousands of riders across a city at once. Route optimisation software does this. Third, it must show you a delivery time before you order, and then deliver within that time.
The scene has two layers. The first layer is the delivery apps. It holds the food delivery app, the quick commerce app and the cloud kitchen. A cloud kitchen is a kitchen with no dining room. It cooks only for delivery, often for several restaurant brands at once. Your biryani may well have come from one.
The second layer is restaurant technology, the restaurant's own systems. A restaurant bills its tables on a restaurant POS, the billing and ordering system at its counter. It receives the orders from all the delivery apps on one screen, through an online order aggregator. Every week, it checks that each app has paid it correctly, with delivery app reconciliation software. The same layer includes office canteens, connected tea machines and drive-through restaurants.
Who earns what? A food delivery app does not cook the food. It connects you, the restaurant and the rider, and it takes a commission from the restaurant on each order. This is the marketplace model. A quick commerce app earns mainly from the margin on the groceries it sells, and from delivery and handling fees. The riders are usually not employees. They are gig workers, independent workers who are paid for each delivery.
Fees also change with the hour. The delivery fee may go up when it rains, or late at night, because many people order and few riders are free. Setting prices this way, from demand at that moment, is called dynamic pricing.