Dabbawala isn't a fair comparison. - The person making the food in the case of Dabbawala, is usually someone's wife. That's basically unpaid labor. Its not fai

Dabbawala isn't a fair comparison. - The person making the food in the case of Dabbawala, is usually someone's wife. That's basically unpaid labor. Its not fair for the wife, but that's a different discussion, staying on topic. - Delivery routes are pre-determined so routes can be planned efficiently. - There's established routines such as the Dabbawala arriving around the same time to pick up food. - The dabbawalas usually use trains and bicycles. So they don't pay for the cost of a car, fuel, insurance and maintenance. - Dabbawalas, AFAIK, only exist in Mumbai, which has very high population density and enough economies of scale to sustain the business. - Dabbawalas don't have a middle man tech company which pays expensive software engineers, and tech executives. So these factors make dabbawalas profitable while food delivery services don't make a profit. We recently started calling restaurants and asking if they have in-house delivery, and avoid UberEats/Doordash/OtherDeliveryService. The other day we ordered Thai food, and the owner of the restaurant delivered the food personally and she was truly grateful that we called them instead of ordering online. This made me wonder, what if restaurants in a city formed Co-op, and started a food delivery service ? - Multiple co-ops across different cities could form a LLC and hire Software engineers to build an App & maintain backend services. - The same app would work across many cities - Each co-op is responsible for hiring its own delivery drivers in the city. This would eliminate a profit-seeking middle man, and keep costs low. I sense that there would be many obstacles, but I think its still possible, and potentially be even better for the consumer and the restaurants.