How Much Do We Know About the Takeaway 200 Million+ Chinese Eat Daily?
Foodthink Says
The most visible transformation is in how Chinese people consume food.
According to media reports, each week 275 million people meet their food and dining needs through the Meituan platform, covering everything from browsing for restaurants and making choices based on rankings, to placing orders, dining in and having takeaway delivered to the door. In 2023, the number of users on takeaway platforms in China reached 535 million. Of these, 4.08% of consumers order takeaway more than 20 times a week (an average of three to four times a day), 13.52% order 11 to 20 times a week (an average of two to three times a day), and 32.78% order five to ten times a week (an average of one to two times a day). In other words, roughly half of China’s urban residents order takeaway almost every single day.
It is not just meals that depend on takeaway—even those who cook at home may source their groceries from e-commerce. Led by major platforms such as Dingdong Maicai, JD Daojia, Xiaoxiang Supermarket and Freshippo, the number of fresh-food e-commerce companies nationwide reached 26,300 in 2023, serving 513 million users. Fresh-food e-commerce accounted for 29.4% of urban residents’ food expenditure.
These takeaway and grocery platforms initially won people’s trust in the name of “convenience”, “efficiency” and “intelligence”. Yet their negative effects on society and the environment—even on food quality and food safety—have become ever more prominent, and the workers behind the platforms, represented most strikingly by delivery riders, have attracted the greatest attention.
In 2024, journalists, scholars and filmmakers alike devoted extensive reporting, research and creative work to takeaway and e-commerce platforms. Here we review the stories, events and works from the past year that left a lasting impression—among them original pieces by Foodthink, reports from institutional and independent media, as well as two new books and two films. Foodthink will continue in 2025 to track the digital technologies and capital behind food production and consumption, and their impact on the natural world and on people within the food system. We also welcome submissions from like-minded creators who wish to contribute to research and discussion.
Delivery Riders Begging Online, and the “Order King” Who Died at His Wheel
However, he was informed that Meituan’s crowdsourcing insurance would not cover the accident. While waiting for a resolution, he gradually depleted his savings.
In the end, hungry and cold, after a long internal struggle, he chose to swallow his pride and beg strangers online for a meal……
But not every rider lives long enough to reach the day when they are reduced to begging online. In August 2024, a delivery rider in Hangzhou died of sudden cardiac arrest on his electric bike while in the middle of a delivery run. According to media reports, the 55-year-old rider, surnamed Yuan, worked relentlessly, often resting for only three or four hours, and was locally renowned as an “order king”.
Hangzhou Rider Forced to “Kneel” Sparks Collective Protests Among Delivery Riders
Five Delivery Riders in a Family of Six: How Is the “Kangaroo Family” Doing Now?
The family had been delivering for Meituan for two years before they were “optimised”—a corporate euphemism for being let go—after the previous Spring Festival. Ma Chuang’s income dropped considerably as a result. On top of that, his father was involved in a traffic accident while on a delivery run, making Ma Chuang deeply aware that being a delivery rider was a “high-risk industry”. In May 2024, he resolved to return to his hometown in Henan and reassess the direction of his life.
Yet he found that the relentless internal clock forged by years of delivery work had left a deep imprint on him. To this day, he struggles to escape the “delivery world” etched into his subconscious.
Takeaway Platform Algorithm Mechanisms and Delivery Riders’ KPIs
Unstable labour relations, low wages, minimal benefits, stringent attendance requirements and overwork are the fundamental features of this digital gig economy. Moreover, because such work is easily replaceable and the labour process highly dispersed, these digital labourers possess virtually no collective bargaining power when confronted with labour–capital conflicts. Above all, algorithms and artificial intelligence have steadily strengthened platforms’ control over digital labour, yet platforms attempt to cloak their drive for efficiency and profit maximisation under the banner of techno-progressivism. In such circumstances, digital labour is alienated into flesh-and-blood machines governed by algorithms.
Riders controlled by platforms and algorithms can only race forward desperately, until they pay the ultimate price with their lives.
►For more news and discussions about delivery riders, see the 2024 Labour Rights Events Roundup: Hard Times, Sustaining One Another | 2024 Labour Rights Events Roundup
Who Should Be Responsible for Takeaway Food Safety?
In August 2024, CCTV News exposed a number of shops that had rented licences to open takeaway outlets, using fake addresses and fake photographs to pass as best-selling, highly rated restaurants—a phenomenon known as “ghost takeaway”. The exposé also uncovered food safety problems at several other takeaway shops, with one best-selling outlet found operating right next to a waste recycling depot.
This is far from a handful of random food safety incidents. As early as 2016, CCTV’s 315 programme exposed the chaos of takeaway platforms partnering with unlicensed restaurants. Eight years on, the problem persists. Yet in their pursuit of market share, platforms simply turn a blind eye to problematic merchants. Some industry insiders also argue that the platforms’ low-price strategy has, to a certain extent, produced a situation of bad money driving out good.
But can ordering takeaway from a renowned big-name restaurant guarantee a safe meal? Famed food programme director Chen Xiaoqing recently revealed during a conversation with Luo Yonghao on a talk programme that he has no takeaway app on his phone and has never ordered takeaway—not even from highly rated or well-reviewed restaurants—”because I’ve been in this industry far too long.” As for the specifics, “I can’t really say, nor am I allowed to.”
When takeaway platforms not only fail to ensure food safety but even foster and fuel a black-market food industry, one cannot help but ask: what meaning does this business model hold for consumers?
Why Does “Life in Reverse” Please Neither Critics nor Audiences?
Predictably, the film fell far short of the commercial expectations set by Xu Zheng and his investors, attracting countless negative reviews and sparking public debate over how capital further consumes and exploits the underclass through cultural products.
In particular, at the film’s conclusion, Xu Zheng attempted to resolve the antagonism between takeaway platforms and riders through a false solution that ran completely counter to audiences’ lived experience of pervasive social pressure. In this sense, even as an opportunistic businessman, Xu Zheng failed this time to grasp the public’s structure of feeling.
A Director Who Reflects on Algorithms Turns Their Debut to Delivery Riders and Programmers
Perhaps this extends beyond programmers and delivery riders alone. In modern society, once people are caught up in the relentless grind of their own jobs, relationships between individuals grow distant and indifferent, even curdling into an irreconcilable hostility.
Only after the protagonist is himself laid off does he realise that programmers and riders are simply two groups equally imprisoned beneath platform capital and algorithms—neither able to control their own fate.
The film closes with the tragedy of a delivery rider’s death, yet it never exploits the suffering of the underclass. Having lived through all of this firsthand, the protagonist makes an “unexpected” life decision. Unlike the protagonist in Life in Reverse, who is once again co-opted by capital, he chooses to stand on the same side as delivery riders, joining hands to resist the platforms and, through individual choices and actions, to seek new hope together.
Perhaps this is also what the film hopes to inspire and encourage in us: living in a society where misfortune and tragedy genuinely exist, if we can truly see one another within it, consciousness will awaken, and change will follow.
Film Vs. Reality: What Is a Delivery Rider’s Life Really Like?
Transitional Labour in the Digital Gallop
Chen Long argues that the labour process for riders on a platform differs from that of workers in a factory, in that riders are governed by more than rules set by an employer alone. On the one hand, control is not held solely by the platform: merchants and customers diffuse that power, superficially transferring and softening the tension between labour and capital. On the other hand, control itself grows ever more covert—all riders can see through the platform are surface-level instructions, yet they cannot discern who truly holds the reins behind the scenes.
Riders appear to have shed the collective working environment of the factory and achieved individual “freedom” and “more work, more pay”, yet digital technology enables the platform to direct each individual rider, producing a contradictory fusion of “freedom” and “control”. In Chen Long’s observation, since the birth of takeaway platforms, the freedom riders can exercise in their labour process has been steadily contracting, while the platform’s control has shown a trend of gradual intensification.
“Transition” refers to the extreme fluidity and uncertainty that characterise delivery work. Sun Ping observed that although riders always say doing deliveries is just “a stopgap”, that stopgap often becomes permanent and the new normal. Once these highly mobile riders enter the gig economy, most will never return to traditional posts in factories. Their transitoriness manifests in hopping from one platform to another: running deliveries today, courier work a while later, and perhaps ride-hailing some time after that.
For today’s gig workers, life and labour, production and reproduction, have never been bound together so tightly. Sun Ping wanted to move beyond a single framework of control to describe gig work on digital platforms, capturing the wholeness of each rider’s life—not merely their labour status and trajectory, but also their family life, friendships and inner thoughts—so that the tense interplay between an individual’s life journey and their work becomes visible.
It is worth noting that after the book’s publication, the authors and editors of the viral Renwu report “Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System”—the first article to link riders to algorithmic control by platforms, and one that triggered a firestorm of online debate the year it appeared—condemned Sun Ping for inappropriately claiming a personal role in the reporting. This in turn sparked wider discussions about research ethics and the norms governing interaction between scholars and the media.
Although the dispute appeared, on the surface, to be a copyright quarrel, its real focus was the vast social influence behind the article and the contest over the cultural capital that such influence could translate into within media and academic circles.
Some have said that, with delivery riders still living and working in the real world, such a debate strikes one as pointedly ironic and tedious. Yet we should recognise the serious significance of this episode: if researchers set out from the very start to convert the discourse surrounding delivery riders into cultural or economic capital, can such a motive sustain them in speaking truly and impartially for riders? And if takeaway platforms are able to hand media or scholars certain resources on the topic, do the riders’ stories still matter?
In the final analysis, the purpose from which media and academic workers speak up for “delivery riders” may determine how—and what kind of—”delivery riders” the public comes to see. And this bears on whether genuine action and real change can ever take place.
Bianlifeng: Alienating Staff into flesh machines
Yet Bianlifeng is perhaps more radical than most internet technology firms. Founder Zhuang Chenchao aims to “take every human decision out of daily operations and hand it over to the computer”, constructing a fully automated control system. A shop assistant’s entire working day is decomposed into seventy to eighty simple tasks, with staff doing nothing but mechanically executing a series of routine actions—sweeping, wiping, restocking shelves, preparing meals, and the like.
A traditional convenience store takes two years to train a shop manager; Bianlifeng needs only six months. Replacing shop managers with an algorithmic system did indeed allow Bianlifeng to expand at a breakneck pace, but the cost was an extremely oppressive work environment for staff who had lost all autonomy, and the profound instability of being shuffled from one shop to another.
Ironically, experience has shown that algorithms are not necessarily superior to humans when it comes to operational decisions. After several years of rapid expansion, from the end of 2021 onwards, Bianlifeng began to see reports of layoffs and closures, with the number of outlets plummeting from over 3,000 to just over 1,000.
Today, Bianlifeng has lost capital’s favour, and its over-reliance on algorithms is drawing growing scrutiny.
Replacing Digital Oligarchs with Cooperatives: An Alternative Takeaway Model
In recent years, the emerging international movement of “platform cooperativism” has been seen as an alternative route. To a certain extent, it reverses the logic of “platform capitalism”, and Europe’s CoopCycle stands as a quintessential example. A European federation of bicycle delivery cooperatives operating in sixteen cities, CoopCycle has developed a free, open-source takeaway app, enabling riders in each city to redevelop the app according to local needs and set up their own bicycle delivery platform cooperatives.
Unlike conventional platform companies, CoopCycle simply provides riders with the essential information tools, but it does not skim profit from every order. Instead, it charges each cooperative 2.5% of its added value (no less than €500 a year) to cover its own operations. At the same time, it offers riders and cooperatives support spanning business models, skills training and consumer communication. The cooperative emphasises: “Money should not make money. All the benefits should flow to workers—you can only earn money by cycling.”
CoopCycle regards itself as a “digital commons”. All data and information generated during deliveries belong to the cooperative, and it does not use information technology to surveil delivery riders. A clear employment relationship also exists between riders and the cooperative: pay is calculated by hours worked rather than number of orders completed, and riders are entitled to benefits including a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, health insurance and paid leave. Through a direct democratic management model of “one cooperative, one vote; one person, one vote”, riders hold full managerial and decision-making authority over the cooperative.
The story of CoopCycle makes one thing abundantly clear: digital technology and takeaway services are not the problem in themselves. When power rests in the hands of workers, technology and platforms can potentially deliver a win–win–win for workers, consumers and the environment.
Singapore’s Legislative Journey for Platform Workers
As one of the first countries in the world to establish dedicated legal protections for platform workers, Singapore’s Platform Workers Bill is regarded as a milestone, offering valuable reference for China and other nations seeking to address labour protections in the platform economy.
Following the Bill’s passage, Singapore’s major ride-hailing and takeaway platforms Grab announced that, starting from 2025, in addition to existing platform fees, they would levy an extra S$0.2 per order (approximately RMB 1) to cover the costs of the new legislation. Whether this move will genuinely safeguard workers’ rights, and whether it is worth emulating in China, are questions we will continue to follow up on.
How Will You Eat in 2025?
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Editor: Tianle