Pandemic Food Delivery: Plummet or Prosper?

Abstract

As one of the many unique markets where the opportunity arose to utilize the COVID-19 pandemic to stimulate monetary growth and increase popularity, third-party delivery services made an interesting case to evaluate financial performance pre- and mid-pandemic. The primary purpose of this research was to determine whether the businesses GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash were successful in facilitating growth with the seemingly advantageous circumstances provided by the national emergency. Financial performance was evaluated utilizing economic key performance indicators (KPIs) for revenue, liquidity, and profitability. All data was collected from eight quarterly income statements and balance sheets from 2019 and 2020 for each company. Averages of the KPIs were computed for cumulative quarters prior to and including March 2020, after the announcement of COVID-19 restrictions, and the quarters subsequent to that date range; the mean values were then compared across both time periods. Results suggest an overall positive trend for DoorDash for all metrics and negative trend in terms of liquidity for UberEats and GrubHub. Furthermore, revenues for all three platforms possessed an increased expansion rate during COVID-19 within a range of 9.07-12.60%. Implications of this experiment include possible research of non-food delivery platforms that operate based on the sale of virtual products during the pandemic or further exploration of such companies as COVID-19 begins to subside.