Technology is essential in daily life from solving problems and fulfilling services to designing products and accessing essential materials. Whatever example we might come up with, there’s a way that technology in app, device or software form is being used to make the way we live better. This is particularly significant when we look at the meeting of technology and food, two arguably distinct areas of life. Technology is, largely, still digital whereas food is a physical medium. Even with the prominence of food media in the form of Instagram feeds and YouTube channels dedicated to culinary trends, the real-world intersection between the two areas has remained relatively limited until recently.
The pandemic ushered in improvements and mass adoption — namely access to groceries and associated food services. Deloitte referred to this as fast-tracking food transformation and in the U.S. food e-commerce increased by 12.4 percent in the early months of 2020’s Covid-19 lockdowns and stay-home orders. Calling it “Food Industry 4.0”, Deloitte explains, “New digital technologies – artificial intelligence, smart data, blockchain, robotisation and precision farming to name a few – present companies with exciting opportunities to boost their productivity and reduce their costs.” We have now entered a new frontier where many of these digital technologies are on an industrial scale yet niche aspects, specifically grocery app development and food e-commerce, are relevant to the ordinary citizen. In the 2020s, what we are seeing is the beginning of how two core aspects of our lives now virtually lay over one another: technology and food services.
Even prior to 2020, the overall global food technology market was reported to be booming: Statista figures from 2019 found that the market was worth $220.32 billion USD and that it would exceed a value of $342.52 billion USD by 2027. As of December 2022, the global online food delivery market size alone was estimated to have a value of $189.70 billion according to Yahoo! Finance. It’s safe to say that the industry growth was due, in the majority, to Covid-19 yet there are a considerable number of factors for why this technology continues to expand. The actual food technology market has changed in many ways: there is better design, interfaces, and investment in the systems; the intermediary technology including smartphones and web platforms is more popular; and, the interrelationship between technology and food is more normalized due to large-scale adoption of services. The reshaping of the food industry through technology offers a thought-provoking argument for how food delivery and the proliferation of grocery app development could, in fact, actually make us healthier.
For the sake of discussion in this blog post, we are interested in the tech area of food apps with referencers to the specific niches of grocery apps, food delivery apps, and food e-commerce apps. This is to ensure we are covering the range of services these apps can offer and how they are often used in an interchangeable way depending on app functionalities, user needs, the business’ reach, and user geography.
From these features, we can see that there is a wide scope of variety across mobile food app tech. Across these food app niches we can categorize them most simply around:
Even with the technical features that easily establish these categories, there is still major overlap and blurring between these apps. For example, Postmates can be used for restaurant, retailers, and grocer orders and delivery, while the apps for Internet of Things devices Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa can be used to add ingredients to shopping lists or make purchases. The main takeaway here is that for nearly every app launched in one of these categories, the actual User Experience (UX) in this mobile app development is quite similar meaning that customers can easily navigate the User Interface (UI) depending on if its a clone of an app in the case of if, hypothetically, a new delivery service app was designed to clone the Doordash app or Postmates app.
A takeaway from the above categorization of the food app vertical is that, in at least one way or another, nearly every niche supports digital grocery access. Not convinced? Here’s just ten of the value benefits that crossover with the grocery niche of food apps:
One last bonus feature is that many of these apps have been developed to be shared between users via the one account or with multi-household options and most automatically sync across cloud servers. This extra feature and the ten value benefits listed above provide a clear, conclusive picture of the net benefits for grocery apps in the lives of users. On a macro level, the positive global impact of the food app development market is measurably remarkable: Statista reports of the U.S. market indicate that 30.4 million adults used grocery apps in 2022 and even with the sharp growth attributed to the pandemic, McKinsey projects that the market hasn’t actually peaked yet.
The digital grocery app industry has changed the way food consumption both for supply (vendors) and demand (consumers) happens, too. Ultimately the ability to apply nuanced preferences to food acquisition — groceries, meals, specialty goods — has created new market segments. “Customers have a wide range of choices to choose from, which has segmented the demand into defined boxes,” attests restaurant services company Lavu, “When shopping for food, customers are now more specific. While some want the reassurance of experience, others are more concerned about affordability and speed of delivery.” This feeds into the various avenues that the grocery industry has evolved into in response to digital customer channels. Globally, there are two areas that this can be seen most markedly:
What we can establish from these two areas is that grocery app development is the on-demand and user-friendly choice more people are opting for. The grocery industry is shifting accordingly with emerging associated technical capabilities and user trends; people want the ease, access, affordability, and convenience grocery and food delivery apps can uphold. This is the key differential in the value proposition between traditional grocery and food providers versus the technical medium: people can customize nearly every feature of their planning and acquisition without needing to leave their homes.
The holistic health impacts of grocery apps for the delivery of groceries and broader food groups are wide-reaching and impact society on both an individual and collective level. For the purposes of this section of our article, we’ll look at health across the following areas of impact reviewed in depth:
Holistic health and wellbeing is assessed through dynamic factors of measurement. The World Health Organization considers this to be a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Through the lens of food and grocery delivery apps health and wellbeing have been impacted in the areas of:
The last three years are the most prominent indicators of how grocery and food delivery apps can shape public health and the related wellbeing area of safety. A leading hallmark of the first global lockdown and ‘shelter-in-place’ orders was the rise in users of grocery and food delivery coupled with the swelling deference for using contactless delivery services for essential goods. In 2021, Krystina Shveda reported for BBC that the pandemic was irrevocably changing grocery shopping and that “Worldwide Google searches for “food delivery” and “local food” reached all-time highs” in April 2020. As people made the decision to use technology to keep sheltering at home, to lower the risk of the pandemic spreading among the community, and, to protect the lives of frontline workers, this had pronounced impacts on public health and safety in direct and indirect ways. Directly, these precautions resulted in less people going out to stores thus reducing pressure on those working and limiting community interactions; indirectly, these strategies tended to result in cooperative outcomes for the collective with people organizing groceries for vulnerable people and also arranging to split grocery and food orders within their communities.
When we reflect on the technical utility of these apps against the case study of Covid-19, we can see how this uptake in grocery and food delivery has prompted equally crucial discourse around individual challenges of how accessing services is essential for every single member of our societies.
Most profoundly, the following groups have been seen to benefit from shifts in how people can access their essential food goods and how we make all spaces, virtual and public, welcoming. This is for people who may fall into the following groups:
Lastly, social harmony can also be strengthened via grocery and food delivery technology. Grocery and food delivery is adjacent to other apps designed for community, such as BuyNothing or Nextdoor, as they’re purpose-built for distributing resources. The flow-on from these apps to grocery and food delivery is using these platforms to share extra food in communities, split grocery deliveries, or assist neighbours with organizing the resources they need. In terms of holistic wellbeing, there are numerous studies associated with how crucial community is to vitality and longevity alongside a healthy diet. The role of grocery and food delivery apps as a facilitator is another compelling justification for how this technology niche is consistent with health. Furthermore, we can observe how these apps are encouraging collaboration and resource sharing, which merges with sustainability and waste reduction projects thus contributing to a healthier environment and people feeling better, too.
The overlap of related tech niches — food and grocery app development and medical health app (mHealth) development — indicates great potential for how healthcare delivery can be intertwined with our store order deliveries. At present, there is limited qualitative and quantitative data to precisely reflect the ways that food and grocery delivery apps can be leveraged in tandem with mHealth apps despite the existing blurring between the two niches. In this final section of the blog, we outline three areas we’ve identified that can be used in conjunction with food and grocery apps to assist users with their health-related needs.
Looking ahead to the future, grocery and food apps clearly already have impressive features that can change how we live. Part of the evolution of these apps is how they are giving greater access to a range of healthier and more environmentally-friendly food solutions. For the years and decades ahead, it’s a valid hypothesis that more sustainable consumption is possible through this tech niche. This has a number of components with regard to:
Overwhelmingly with fully-fledged automation solutions like self-driving cars and robotic dispatch centres on the horizon, the food and grocery app industry will be changed again. Evolutions in technology will directly impact this industry and it’s still difficult to pinpoint what the flow-on to the market and the customer experience will be. Regardless of these shifts, we can’t forget that food is both essential for survival and a huge part of global culture. This tech vertical fulfils numerous market demands — both in innovation and solution-delivery — yet there are teething problems with B2B interactions between the food services businesses and tech companies that Anne Freer writes about for Business of Apps. Freer says, “To thrive, it’s essential that apps partner with the restaurants and vendors that best suit their user’s needs, and that they find clever ways to incentivize continued use in this more-competitive-than-ever space.” While the future isn’t entirely certain, what is guaranteed, as much as anything can be, is that food technology demand will persist and the related consumer behaviors established during 2020 will extend well into the 21st century.
