15 Most Trending and Profitable Food Delivery Business Ideas You Can Start Now

Since the pandemic has hit us, there’s been considerable growth in the online food delivery business. The market share of the online food delivery business is enormous, and according to a report by Statista, the online food delivery business is expected to show an annual growth rate of 7.6% and reach a projected market value of $466.2 bn by 2027.

So delivering food to customers is a business venture you shouldn’t miss. When starting your food delivery business, there are many points you should take care of, like selecting your niche, your target audience, food delivery business ideas, marketing ideas, and much more.

In this blog, we will discuss ideas for different food delivery businesses, their scope, and areas of profitability. 

Food Delivery Business Statistics

• In 2024, the global revenue of the eServices online food delivery segment platform-to-consumer delivery is expected to be 96,864.4 million US dollars.
• Since 2014, digital ordering and delivery have grown 300 percent faster than dine-in traffic.
• For online food ordering, customers are looking for comforting, simple, and cost-effective options. The top three items that have spiked in sales of branded restaurants are sandwiches and wraps (+21%), burgers (+10%), and pizza (+9%).

Best Food Delivery Business Ideas

Let’s explore some of the best food business ideas that you can explore and start your own food business. Here are some of them.

1. Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Delivery Business

   Eating healthy fruits helps you to maintain your body’s strength. Nowadays, customers’ demand increases as they want fresh organic fruits straight from the orchard or farm. But that’s not a feasible option for the customer to go to a farmer’s market and purchase it. 

   

   So, the best way to diversify the market is by providing fresh tropical and exotic fruits and vegetables to your customers. 

   And one more thing is that you can include fruits and vegetables in your delivery menu that are difficult for the customers to find at local grocery stores and vendors, making it one of the most exciting and delicious delivery options.

   Moreover, you also have an option to include fruit salad delivery services, especially for the customers who are fruit lovers and know the health consciousness. For this online business, you’ll need a smartphone and a reliable car/van to deliver fruits and vegetables to the customer’s location.

2. Dairy Items Delivery Business

   You can even think of including the daily home essentials in your food delivery business menu like eggs, milk, bread, cheese, and even curd that people want every morning. 

   Bread and milk delivery services can quickly profit your business as there is 100% surety that almost everyone eats dairy products regularly. Moreover, you can also offer your customers to opt for a weekly, monthly, and annual subscription plan.

   To start this business, you need to make sure that value added products must be available from trusted manufacturers, and that is because of delivery quality perspectives.

3. Egg Delivery Business

   The egg delivery service is a substantial growth business as you can quickly target multiple audiences like individuals, restaurants, hotels, and even industrial areas.

   The good part of this business is that it’s a long-term business, and there are more chances of getting potential customers to your business, depending on the customer’s demand.

   Moreover, you also have an option to do strong partnerships with as many local farmers as possible, depending on the demand. Also, you’ll need a vehicle like a car/truck and a bunch of delivery guys to safely deliver the eggs to your customer’s location on time.

4. Sandwich and Salad Delivery Business

   This food delivery business has huge potential to generate good revenue. This online business is primarily for customers who follow strict dietary habits.

   You have an option to either make a sandwich by own or have a partnership with catering or restaurant services that makes sandwiches and salads in a wide range. Once your sandwiches or salads are prepared, you can efficiently deliver it to your customers.

   You don’t need a commercial kitchen nor do you have to incur high startup costs.

5. Dietary Meals Delivery For Patients

   

   Since the covid-19 epidemic has struck us, there’s been an unexpected rise in the admission of patients to hospitals. Many doctor’s patients have strict dietary restrictions in terms of health consciousness. So, you can start a dietary meals delivery business, especially for such patients.

   You can instruct the chef to team up with a dietician or nutrition coach who caters to your business demographic. For example, if you start this delivery business, your individual consumers will be the people who have chronic diseases with specific dietary requirements. So brace yourself for long-term relationships with them. You can also arrange a food supply of homemade meals for patients to provide them with delicious and nutritious food.

   The most preferred menu option for this business includes vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Moreover, you need to take care of the menu that usually avoids wheat, dairy, soy, red meat, nuts, and other ingredients. You will be required to design meal planning and provide nutritious food/diet food for people with health consciousness.

   Conduct a thorough market research before getting into this business. These kinds of small businesses usually work really well in metro cities.

6. Coffee Delivery Business

   It’s a common fact that people love to drink coffee in the morning. So, it is the best option to start your coffee delivery business as it will provide immense benefit to your business as you’ll have more such customers.

   

   You can set up a coffee shop or can provide delivery services to the corporate areas where employees can grab a coffee during their working hours or before giving a head start to their busy schedules. And the essential factor in starting your coffee delivery business is selecting the business location.

   It would be best to choose the area that makes it easy for you and your delivery driver to deliver the coffee to the customers on time. It is a very lucrative business to start with moderate capital investment.

7. Green & Organic Food Delivery

   Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an ever-growing demand for organically grown foods among people who know the importance of organic food to their bodies. 

   So, you must include the food delivery services for certified organic, gluten-free, paleo, and vegetarian options for all diets. In addition, you can include hand-selected and seasonal ingredients from the top farms in your organic food delivery business.

   The good part about this business is that you can even start with small infrastructure and low-cost investment. The only precaution you need to take in the food ordering, and delivery process is to pack it in a 100 percent recyclable box. 

8. Lunch Delivery Business

   It’s one part of the food delivery business that is designed explicitly for employees or college students who have busy working hours or are not able to bring lunch as per the situation. For individuals with a busy schedule who want good meals or something similar to home cooked meals, you can provide this right out of your own kitchen.

   The complete delivery process can be done over the internet or a phone call. 

   To deliver parcels, you would need to partner with restaurants that offer different dishes from which customers can choose.

9. Corporate Food Delivery

   Corporate food delivery is another niche food business you can initiate with lower capital investment, and most importantly, you’ll have a good customer base.

   In these different types of food delivery businesses, you have to source the fresh food, cooked meals, or meal kits from a reputable restaurant or catering business and deliver the food directly to the customer’s office location.

   Here, you can establish an online store or food delivery app, upload your menus and pricing, provide multiple payment methods, and promote the site in commercial places. People can place the orders and even can make the payments at your site. You can also start accepting orders for corporate events.

10. Pet Food Delivery

    Nowadays, the on-demand pet food delivery business is gradually growing, and the good part is that by 2027 it is expected to reach USD 127.71 billion. So, you can imagine the potential growth of such an on-demand pet food delivery business.

    As the name suggests, a pet food delivery business allows customers to order food for their pets. Moreover, you can set an option for them to either deliver the food to their location or you can provide self-service. 

11. Grocery Delivery

    A grocery delivery startup is one of the most trending, easy-to-start, and profitable businesses in the food industry.

    

    Generally, there are two models involved in the grocery delivery business.

    • The first one is low cost. Here, you’ll need to open an online store, price tag your products, promote your business online, and on receiving the order, deliver it to the customer.
    • The second is an on-demand substantial investment. Here, you’ll have your business portal or delivery platform, and you have to invite small grocery store owners to enlist their products. In simple words, you’ll act as a grocery marketplace.

    For your own grocery delivery business, you must be very careful when you plan to deliver fresh, frozen, or cool groceries to your customers, especially in hot weather. In addition, you need to provide better guidance to your delivery driver to be faster and safer while reaching the customer’s doorstep. 

12. Online Frozen Food Ordering Services

    The frozen food market size is expected to reach USD 312.3 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 5.0%.

    To start your own frozen food ordering services, you have to choose your preferred target market and be ready with a supplier from whom you’ll get the frozen foods.

    Some of the everyday food items you can include in your frozen food delivery business are frozen seafood, potatoes, ready to eat snacks, vegetables, and ready made meals. Moreover, you can include low fat, egg-free, nut-free, low salt, organic foods, and low calories.

13. Liquor Delivery Business

    Starting a liquor delivery service is one of the regulated delivery service business ideas. The primary reason is that it is subject to variable regulatory concerns depending on the city you’re operating your business. You need the necessary licenses depending on which state you are operating in.

    In addition to craft beer, wine, and a wide array of spirits, you can sell packaged snacks as well. Liquor delivery business has a large customer base, so it is a great business opportunity. But at the same time, it has major players already taking control. So you need to provide value and innovation.

    

    For starting this business, you are bound with certain limitations: 

    • Time liquor can be delivered
    • The amount you can deliver
    • The age of the delivery person
    • The legal documentation required for the recipient

14. Halal Food Delivery

    Halal food delivery service is permissible in Islamic law and is frequently applicable to both food and drinks. 

    There are over 1,703,146,000 Muslims in the world today, with about 2,595,000 of them in the United States of America. 

    This goes to show that there is a large market for home delivery of halal foods.

15. Pizza Delivery Business

    Pizza delivery is a popular and successful food delivery business today. Generally, you have two options to start this business.

    • One is to own a franchise of a branded pizza company
    • Second is to set up your own pizza delivery service

    

    A pizza delivery business can be started with a low startup capital. By gauging the market demand, starting in the right location, and offering value at the right price can help you achieve rapid growth.

    In your menu, you can include different tastes and flavors of pizza to attract more customers. These are some of the best food delivery business ideas that you can adopt to achieve great success. For any business you prefer, the essential thing is to make your delivery faster and accurate. It is made possible by providing drivers with route planning and optimization software like Upper Route Planner, which makes it easy for them to find the shortest route available and deliver the food items to the customer on time.

How has Upper Route Planner Helped Businesses in The Food Delivery Industry?

Let me share with you one good example of one of Upper Route Planner’s happy clients. Chef Nicole is a Miami-based healthy meal delivery service that creates and delivers healthy and well-balanced meals. Before using Upper Route Planner, they used to follow a manual route planning process to create delivery routes for drivers. However, it was an extremely time-consuming task and they used to spend 10 hours per week just for planning and scheduling deliveries.

Today, Chef Nicole, after adopting Upper Route Planner’s food delivery route planner, saved 10 hours per week and is delivering 3X more healthy meals to the customers on time. Must be wondering how, right?

Read the complete story of our client Chef Nicole’s journey with Upper Route Planner and you can also check out this video where he is sharing his experience. 

Adopt Smart Ways to turn your Delivery Business Idea into a Profitable Startup

In this blog, we came across many food delivery business ideas to start. But, just starting a business isn’t enough; you need to maintain your profitability, deliver customer satisfaction, and carry out improvisations keeping in mind customer experience.

For all this, you should focus on the delivery process, which is the most crucial part of the food delivery business. To ease your work, you should adopt route optimization software like the Upper Route Planner that optimizes and gets you the best route for all your deliveries.

Planning your route manually using Google Maps and pen-paper could take a lot of time. But using Upper Route Planner, you can save up to 90% of the planning time, and you can utilize the saved time to make more deliveries. Upper optimizes and provides you with a route that saves 40% of your fuel costs. Food deliveries must be accurate and timely, making it easy for you and your delivery driver to deliver the food items to the customers.

Also, along with route optimization, you can instantly dispatch delivery drivers, generate invoices, provide proof of delivery, and generate various reports. So, what else do you need when you can save route planning time, save fuel costs, and deliver more, all at one place.