How Much Do We Really Know About the Food Delivery Ordered Daily by Over 200 Million Chinese?
Foodthink Says
This transformation is most evident in the way food is consumed.
According to media reports, 275 million people turn to the Meituan platform each week to satisfy their dining needs—whether browsing for restaurants, consulting rankings to decide where to eat, placing orders, dining in, or having meals delivered to their doors. In 2023, the user base for food delivery platforms across China surged to 535 million. Of these users, 4.08% order deliveries more than 20 times a week (an average of three to four times daily), 13.52% order between 11 and 20 times a week (two to three times daily), and 32.78% order between five and 10 times a week (one to two times daily). Put simply, roughly half of all urban residents in China order food delivery almost every day.
Reliance on delivery extends beyond ready-made meals; even when cooking at home, shoppers are increasingly sourcing their groceries online. Spearheaded by industry leaders such as Dingdong Maicai, JD Daojia, Xiaoxiang Supermarket, and Hema, the number of fresh food e-commerce businesses across China reached 26,300 in 2023, serving a user base of 513 million. Transactions through these platforms accounted for 29.4% of urban households’ food spending.
These food delivery and grocery platforms initially won over the public by promising ‘convenience’, ‘efficiency’, and ‘smart’ technology. Yet their detrimental impact on society, the environment, and even food quality and safety has grown increasingly difficult to ignore. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the plight of the workers powering these platforms, most notably the delivery riders themselves.
Throughout 2024, journalists, academics, and filmmakers have dedicated extensive attention to food delivery and e-commerce platforms through reporting, research, and creative projects. Here, we bring together the most striking stories, events, and cultural works from the past year. This selection features original content from Foodthink alongside reporting from institutional media and independent creators, as well as two new books and two films. In 2025, Foodthink will continue to track the digital technologies and capital forces behind food production and consumption, and their impact on both people and nature within the food system. We also welcome like-minded creators to submit their work and join our research and discussions.
The Food Delivery Riders Begging Online and the “Top-Order Rider” Who Died Suddenly on His E-bike
However, he was informed that Meituan’s crowdsourcing insurance would not cover the incident. As he waited, he slowly drained his savings.
Ultimately, hungry and freezing, and after much inner turmoil, he finally decided to swallow his pride and beg strangers online for a meal…
But not all riders survive to reach that point. In August 2024, a delivery rider in Hangzhou died suddenly on his e-bike while making a delivery. According to media reports, 55-year-old rider Mr Yuan pushed himself relentlessly, often resting for only three or four hours, and was locally renowned as a “top-order rider”
A Rider Forced to “Kneel” in Hangzhou Sparks Collective Protest Among Delivery Couriers
What Happened to the “Kangaroo Family” of Six, Where Five Work as Delivery Riders?
After two years with Meituan, the family was “optimised” (a corporate euphemism for being laid off) following last year’s Spring Festival, significantly cutting Ma’s income. Compounded by his father’s traffic accident while delivering orders, Ma came to realise just how high-risk the delivery industry truly is. In May 2024, he resolved to return to his hometown in Henan province to chart a new course for his life.
Yet he found that the relentless schedule of delivery work had left a deep imprint on his internal clock. To this day, he struggles to escape the subconscious “delivery bubble” that still dictates his pace of life.
Algorithmic Mechanisms on Delivery Platforms and Riders’ KPIs
Unstable employment relations, low wages, minimal benefits, strict attendance tracking, and overwork are defining features of this digital gig economy. Furthermore, because these jobs are highly interchangeable and work processes are fragmented, digital workers possess almost no collective bargaining power when faced with labour disputes. Most critically, algorithms and artificial intelligence have increasingly tightened platforms’ control over digital workers, while companies attempt to mask their pursuit of maximum efficiency and profit behind the guise of technological progress. Under these conditions, digital workers are reduced to flesh-and-blood machines governed by code.
Riders trapped by platforms and algorithms have no choice but to keep running, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.
► For further news and discussion on delivery riders, see our review of 2024 labour rights events:Standing Together in Hard Times: A Review of 2024 Labour Rights Events
Who Should Bear Responsibility for the Food Safety of Deliveries?
In August 2024, CCTV News exposed a wave of ‘ghost kitchens’ operating under borrowed licences, using fake addresses and photographs to pose as highly rated, best-selling establishments. The report also highlighted widespread food safety violations across multiple delivery outlets, with some popular shops operating alongside scrap recycling stations.
These are far from isolated incidents of poor food safety. As early as 2016, CCTV’s 315 Gala exposed the rampant practice of delivery platforms partnering with unlicensed restaurants. Nearly eight years on, the problem persists. In the race for market share, platforms have turned a blind eye to non-compliant vendors. Industry insiders argue that the platforms’ race-to-the-bottom pricing strategy has, in many ways, driven quality out of the market in favour of cheaper, substandard alternatives.
But does ordering from well-known restaurants guarantee a safe meal? Chen Xiaoqing, the acclaimed director of several food programmes, recently revealed during a conversation with Luo Yonghao that he does not use delivery apps and never orders takeout, regardless of a restaurant’s ratings or reviews. ‘I have been too deeply embedded in this industry,’ he explained. When pressed for specifics, he replied, ‘It is hard to say, and perhaps best left unsaid.’
When delivery platforms fail to ensure food safety and instead foster or even accelerate a shadow food industry, one must ask: what value does this business model actually offer to consumers?
Why Did the Film *Us and Them* Fail to Win Critical or Commercial Success?
Predictably, the film fell far short of the commercial expectations set by Xu Zheng and his investors. It was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews, sparking public debate over how capital exploits and commodifies working-class lives through cultural products.
Most notably, in the film’s final act, Xu Zheng attempts to resolve the tension between delivery platforms and riders with a contrived, unrealistic solution. This directly contradicts audiences’ lived experience of pervasive societal pressure. In this sense, even from the perspective of a savvy businessman, Xu Zheng failed to grasp the public’s emotional landscape.
The Director Who Questioned the Algorithm Turns His Debut Towards Delivery Riders and Programmers
This dynamic extends beyond programmers and delivery riders. In modern society, as individuals become absorbed in the relentless pace of their own work, human connections grow distant and cold, sometimes hardening into irreconcilable hostility.
It is only after facing redundancy himself that the protagonist realises programmers and riders are merely two groups caught under the same weight of platform capital and algorithms, both powerless to steer their own destinies.
The film concludes with the tragic death of a delivery rider, yet it refrains from exploiting the hardship of the working class. Having witnessed and experienced it all, the protagonist makes an “unexpected” life choice. Rather than being co-opted by capital once more—as happens in *A Life Against the Current*—he chooses to stand alongside the delivery riders. Together they challenge the platform, seeking a new kind of hope through personal agency and collective action.
Perhaps this is the film’s quiet call to action: in a society where misfortune and tragedy are undeniable realities, if we can truly see one another through them, awareness will awaken and change will follow.
Film vs. Reality: What Is Life Really Like for Delivery Riders?
Overwork in the Digital Rush
Chen Long argues that the labour process for platform-based riders differs from that of factory workers; they are not simply governed by employer-imposed rules. Control is not held solely by the platform. Merchants and customers disperse this authority, superficially diffusing and softening traditional employer-employee tensions. Conversely, the mechanisms of control are growing increasingly opaque. Through the app, riders see only surface-level directives, unable to discern who is truly orchestrating the system behind the scenes.
Riders may appear to have escaped the collective confines of factory work, gaining individual ‘freedom’ and the promise of earning in proportion to their effort. Yet digital technology allows platform management to target every individual, forging a paradoxical hybrid of ‘freedom’ and ‘control’. Chen Long observes that since delivery platforms first emerged, the autonomy riders wield in their work has steadily narrowed, while platform oversight continues to tighten.
The term ‘transitional’ captures the high mobility and uncertainty inherent in delivery work. Sun Ping notes that while riders frequently claim they are only doing it ‘as a temporary fix’, this transition often hardens into a permanent and normalised state. Once such mobile workers enter the gig economy, they rarely return to traditional roles like factory shifts. Instead, their ‘transitional’ status manifests as constant platform-hopping: delivering meals one month, switching to parcel couriers the next, and perhaps moving to ride-hailing services down the line.
For contemporary gig workers, life and labour, production and reproduction, have never been more tightly intertwined. Sun Ping seeks to look beyond a narrow framework of control to describe gig labour on digital platforms, aiming instead to portray the full spectrum of a rider’s existence. This extends beyond merely mapping work conditions and routines to encompass their personal lives, families, friendships, and reflections, thereby revealing the fraught interplay between individual life trajectories and paid work.
It is worth noting that following the book’s publication, the author and editors of the Renwu magazine piece Trapped in the System: Delivery Riders—which sparked widespread online debate and was the first to explicitly link riders’ plight to platform algorithmic control—censured Sun Ping for what they viewed as an inappropriate appropriation of their reporting. The incident sparked broader debates regarding research ethics and professional boundaries between academics and the media.
While the dispute may appear superficially to be about copyright, its core concerns the article’s substantial social impact and the subsequent struggle to convert that influence into cultural capital within both media and academic spheres.
Some might argue that while delivery riders continue to live and work in the real world, such academic disputes come across as deeply ironic, even trivial. Yet we must recognise the underlying gravity: if a researcher’s primary motive from the outset is to capitalise on narratives about riders for cultural or economic gain, can that commitment to impartial advocacy truly endure? If platforms can simply funnel resources to journalists or scholars covering the issue, do the riders’ stories retain their authenticity?
Ultimately, the motives behind how journalists and academics choose to amplify the voices of ‘delivery riders’ will shape how the public perceives them, and what image of the ‘delivery rider’ takes hold. This, in turn, determines whether genuine advocacy and systemic change can take root.
Bianlifeng: Alienating shop staff into mere human machines
But Bianlifeng is likely even more radical than most internet technology firms. Its founder, Zhuang Chenchao, aims to “strip all human decision-making from daily operations and hand it over to computers”, creating a fully automated control system. Employees’ daily routines are fragmented into 70–80 simple tasks, restricting them to mechanically carrying out repetitive duties such as sweeping, wiping surfaces, restocking, and assembling food.
Training a store manager at a traditional convenience retailer takes two years, whereas Bianlifeng requires just six months. Substituting store managers with an algorithmic system has undoubtedly fuelled Bianlifeng’s rapid expansion, but the price has been an intensely oppressive work environment for staff stripped of autonomy, compounded by the extreme instability of being constantly rotated between different locations.
Ironically, experience has shown that algorithms are not inherently superior to humans in operational decision-making. Following years of rapid growth, reports of layoffs and store closures began to surface at Bianlifeng from the end of 2021, with its outlet count plummeting from more than 3,000 to just over 1,000.
Today, Bianlifeng has fallen out of favour with investors, and its over-reliance on an algorithm-driven operating model is coming under scrutiny.
Replacing digital oligarchs with cooperatives: an alternative delivery model
In recent years, the emergent global movement of “platform cooperativism” has gained traction as a viable alternative, offering a partial reversal of platform capitalist logic. Europe’s CoopCycle stands out as a prime example. Operating across sixteen cities, this federation of bicycle delivery co-ops has developed a free, open-source food delivery application. It allows riders in each city to customise and adapt the software to local conditions, enabling them to launch their own independent bicycle delivery co-operatives.
Unlike conventional platform firms, CoopCycle simply provides riders with the necessary digital tools. Rather than extracting a commission on every order, it charges a fee equivalent to 2.5% of each co-operative’s added value (with a minimum annual fee of €500) to cover its own operational costs. The network also assists riders and co-ops with guidance on business planning, skills training, and customer relations. The co-operative’s guiding principle is clear: “Money should not beget money. All profits ought to flow to the workers, and income must be earned strictly through cycling.”
CoopCycle frames itself as a “digital commons”. All data and information generated during deliveries remain the property of the co-operatives, and the network expressly avoids using information technology to monitor or track riders. Furthermore, a clear employer–employee relationship exists between the riders and their co-ops. Wages are calculated by hours worked rather than by order volume, and workers are entitled to the minimum wage, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and paid annual leave. Operating under a direct democratic model of “one co-operative, one vote; one person, one vote”, riders retain full managerial and decision-making authority.
The CoopCycle model demonstrates that neither digital technology nor food delivery services are inherently problematic. When power rests firmly in the hands of workers, technology and platforms can indeed deliver a genuine win–win scenario for the workforce, consumers, and the environment alike.
The legislative path for platform workers in Singapore
As one of the first countries globally to enact dedicated legal protections for platform workers, Singapore’s Platform Workers Bill is widely regarded as a landmark piece of legislation. It offers a valuable reference for China and other nations seeking to address labour protection issues within the platform economy.
Following the bill’s passage, Grab, Singapore’s leading ride-hailing and food delivery platform, announced that from 2025 it will add a S$0.20 surcharge (approximately RMB 1) per order on top of existing platform fees to cover compliance costs under the new law. Whether this measure will adequately safeguard workers’ rights, and whether it presents a model worth adopting domestically, are questions we will continue to monitor.
How will you eat in 2025?
We welcome your comments and perspectives. Those interested in writing and research are also invited to join our writers’ community, where we can continue to explore together the labour, health and environmental issues lying behind our food.
Editor: Tianle