Restaurants
Independent operators are funding their own disintermediation.
Third-party delivery platforms take a quarter to a third of a ticket and own the customer relationship that results. Four in five independent restaurants use them anyway, because the alternative is invisibility. The opening is a marketplace that charges a rate an operator can actually absorb and hands the relationship back.
- $1.55T
- US restaurant and foodservice sales projected for 20262026 State of the Restaurant Industry, February 2026 · National Restaurant Association
- $44.3B
- Revenue of US food delivery services — the intermediaries between restaurants and their customers2026, up 10.8% on the year · IBISWorld
- 25–35%
- Blended real cost of third-party delivery once all fees stack2026; base commission alone is 15–30% · Rezku
- 68.1%
- Share of verified US restaurant openings from independent single-unit operatorsJune–September 2026 · Restaurant Pipeline
How the market is structured
Independents are not a niche within US food service — they account for roughly two-thirds of new openings. They also operate on margins where a thirty-percent platform fee is the difference between a profitable service and a loss-making one, and about 80% of them use third-party delivery for all or part of their operation regardless.
The tools around them are as fragmented as the operators. Ordering, phones, menus and payments typically come from different vendors, and the delivery platform is often the only system that sees the customer — which is exactly the relationship the restaurant is paying to lose.
Where the opportunity is
Two things have to be true at once for a lower take rate to be viable. The marketplace has to cost much less to run — which means real menu data assembled by machine rather than by sales teams — and the platform has to earn from more than the order: advertising, voice, merchant software, supply.
Supply is the part a delivery app cannot copy. A platform that runs a kitchen's orders knows what it sells, and can stock what it needs: RestaurantPro's supplies page already sells Moksha's wholesale coffee and matcha to the restaurants on it, at prices the database sets.
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