From food delivery to urban interface

The HosByte project examined how hospitality small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can manage smart omnichannel sales. In this article, we look into Finland’s food-delivery market, which can be understood through three overlapping periods: market creation, network scale, and an emerging period of orchestration.

Across these periods, platforms have evolved from transaction-focused interfaces into habitual interfaces that coordinate a wider range of local demand and fulfilment. For restaurants, the strategic challenge is to benefit from platform access while retaining enough control to recognise customers, shape experiences, sustain relationships, and preserve meaningful alternatives.

Beyond delivery

A decade ago, app-based food delivery could be understood as a logistics innovation in which a restaurant prepared the meal, a courier transported it, and a digital service facilitated the transaction. That description is now too narrow. In Finland, delivery platforms increasingly organise how consumers discover restaurants and other food-service providers, compare alternatives, pay, receive orders, and access groceries, retail products, mobility, and other local services.

Restaurants compete not only through what they produce, but also through how customers encounter, evaluate, and return to them. Traditionally, many of these functions were closely connected within the restaurant, where premises created visibility, the menu framed choice, staff interpreted the offer, the counter completed the transaction, and the restaurant could recognise returning guests. On-demand food delivery can separate food production, points of sale, and consumer interaction across different organisational and technological arrangements (Ashton, Tuomi & Backman 2023). This separation matters because a company can gain control over customer relationships without owning the restaurant.

Omnichannel research shows that customers move across physical and digital touchpoints and expect a coherent journey (Verhoef, Kannan & Inman 2015). Platform-mediated food service introduces a more difficult problem because the restaurant no longer controls all the touchpoints that need to work together. Platform integration therefore changes not only how channels connect, but also who mediates the customer journey and who develops the capabilities required to manage it (Bahar, Nenonen & Starr 2021).

A delivery platform can simultaneously operate as a marketplace, search interface, payment mechanism, promotional environment, data intermediary, and logistics coordinator. Restaurants gain reach and infrastructure, while platforms gain a position between the customer’s decision to buy and their choice of restaurant. They therefore create value together while competing over customer access and influence (Bahar, Nenonen & Starr 2022).

What platforms compete for has also changed. Early competition concerned whether consumers would adopt app-based delivery. Later, it concerned which platform could concentrate the strongest network of consumers, restaurants, and fulfilment capacity. Increasingly, the competition concerns which platform becomes the habitual interface through which people initiate and organise local consumption.

Three periods of competition

Finland provides an interesting case because platform competition can be understood through three partly overlapping periods. These periods represent shifts in the main competitive challenge facing platforms. Each period also leaves behind conditions that support the next. Market creation establishes repeatable behaviour, network scale concentrates participation around it, and orchestration extends the resulting interface across new forms of demand and fulfilment.

Market creation

The first period was market creation. When Wolt and Foodora established operations in Finland in 2015, the immediate challenge was to make app-based restaurant delivery an ordinary consumer practice. Restaurants needed sufficient demand to participate, customers needed enough restaurant choice to make the application useful, and couriers needed enough orders to make fulfilment viable. Each group increased the platform’s value for the others, reflecting the multi-sided character of platform markets (Rochet & Tirole 2003). But network participation alone was not the decisive achievement. The platform also had to make ordering easy enough to become repeatable.

The important innovation was to bring searching, choosing, ordering, paying, tracking, and arranging delivery into a single interface. Repeated use can turn such convenience into routine because frequently performed digital behaviours can become habitual over time (Limayem, Hirt & Cheung 2007). Consumers did not need to repeat the purchasing process from scratch each time, instead they learned a familiar sequence: open the app, choose, pay, wait. The result was more than transactional efficiency. The interface became easy to use habitually.

Network scale

The second period was network scale. Once app-based ordering had become familiar, growing participation made the interface increasingly valuable. More consumers attracted more restaurants, and greater restaurant choice reinforced consumer use. These reinforcing effects favoured concentration around platforms where demand and supply were already dense.

During its investigation of Wolt’s exclusivity and price-parity terms, the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority (FCCA) reported that Wolt held approximately 70 to 80 percent of Finland’s restaurant food-ordering and delivery platform market. The FCCA later reported that Wolt had gained approximately 5 to 10 percentage points of market share from Foodora while exclusivity agreements were in use. After those agreements ended, the trend reversed, although Foodora’s recovery remained modest (FCCA 2025a; 2025b).

For restaurants, the consequence of network scale was straightforward. As more consumer demand concentrated on a platform, being visible and available on that platform became more important. The platform’s advantage therefore comes not only from its size, but also from its growing role as the main intermediary connecting consumer demand with local supply (Rochet & Tirole 2003).

The Finnish market changed significantly in 2026. Foodora ceased operations in Finland at the end of February. Uber Eats officially launched in Finland in May, and by August had announced expansion to eight additional cities (Yle News 2026a; 2026c; 2026d). These changes could be interpreted as another round of delivery-platform competition. However, the more consequential development is the widening scope of the platforms themselves. Wolt is expanding beyond restaurant delivery, while Uber combines delivery with mobility and other services. This suggests that a third period is emerging.

Orchestration

The third period is orchestration. Once consumers routinely use a platform for restaurant delivery, the competitive question can shift from enlarging a delivery network to coordinating a wider variety of needs and resources through the same interface. Scale refers to how many consumers, businesses, and service providers participate in the platform. Here, orchestration refers to the platform’s ability to coordinate demand, supply, information, and fulfilment across them. Platform research similarly describes platform owners as coordinating ecosystems of autonomous actors and aligning activities across ecosystem sub-systems (Hein et al. 2020; Isckia, De Reuver & Lescop 2020).

A platform coordinating restaurant meals, groceries, retail goods, mobility, reservations, and different forms of delivery therefore competes not only for meal occasions, but increasingly to become the consumer’s starting point for local consumption. In this sense, the delivery app can begin to function as an urban interface, a digital starting point for local services. This expansion across multiple categories reflects the emergence of super-app strategies, whereby platforms seek to satisfy a growing range of everyday consumer needs through a single interface (Hasselwander 2024).

Easier ordering supported repeat use, and repeated participation helped build network scale (Limayem, Hirt & Cheung 2007; Rochet & Tirole 2003). From that position, platforms can pursue growth by adding new categories and services (Hasselwander 2024).

The three periods therefore form a cumulative shift. Easier ordering supported repeat use, and repeated participation helped build network scale (Limayem, Hirt & Cheung 2007; Rochet & Tirole 2003). From that position, platforms can pursue growth by adding new categories and services (Hasselwander 2024). For restaurants, the important result is that the platform becomes more than a delivery channel. It becomes an interface that can shape when and how customers encounter the restaurant.

From delivery to orchestration

One aspect of orchestration is visible in the gap between the simple interface experienced by the customer and the changing arrangements behind it. Customers may still place the same dinner order even when the labour, technology, or legal arrangements used to deliver it change.

Finland’s treatment of courier work illustrates this. The Supreme Administrative Court concluded that the statutory characteristics of an employment relationship were met in the Wolt courier relationship it examined (KHO 2025:41). In March 2026, the court rejected Wolt’s application to overturn that decision, and the Finnish Tax Administration subsequently announced revised tax guidance for 2027 (Supreme Administrative Court of Finland 2025; 2026; Finnish Tax Administration 2026).

Yet fulfilment is not converging on a single model. Wolt began hiring couriers as employees in Finland in early 2026 (Yle News 2026b). At the same time, Uber Eats allows couriers to work independently or as employees of fleet partners (Yle News 2026d), while Wolt allows merchants to use their own drivers alongside Wolt courier partners. The range of fulfilment options is also expanding through other technologies. Wolt has used delivery robots in Finland, while Uber Eats announced its Finnish robot rollout in August 2026 (Wolt 2025; Yle News 2026c).

What matters strategically is the coexistence of these different fulfilment models, rather than any one model becoming dominant. Fulfilment is becoming modular in practice, allowing platforms to draw on different couriers, delivery methods, and technologies while keeping the customer-facing interface relatively stable. This resembles the broader platform logic in which components can change while a stable core is retained (Hein et al. 2020).

This modularity does not create the separation between interface control and asset ownership. That separation is already part of the platform model (Gawer 2021). Modular fulfilment instead helps platforms preserve and adapt that model as regulatory conditions, labour arrangements, and delivery technologies change.

A platform can organise the customer’s ordering environment without owning the restaurant, employing all the people who move the order, or developing the delivery technology. Its coordinating role lies in receiving customer requests, deciding how they should be fulfilled, assigning the necessary resources, setting expectations, and coordinating the actors involved. Modularity therefore helps the platform maintain control over how transactions are organised even when the resources used to fulfil them change.

Expansion beyond restaurant meals extends this coordinating position. In January 2026, Wolt reported that more than 20 percent of its orders globally came from non-restaurant categories, including groceries, pharmacy products, electronics, and beauty products (Wolt 2026). For restaurants, the relevance is indirect but important. As more customer needs pass through the same interface, the platform can become a more frequent starting point for local purchasing.

Expansion can also extend vertically through the restaurant journey. DoorDash, Wolt’s parent company and a delivery-platform operator, acquired SevenRooms, a hospitality technology platform, in June 2025. SevenRooms provides capabilities for reservations, customer relationship management, marketing, table management, and guest experience. DoorDash linked the acquisition to a broader commerce platform intended to support both in-store and digital customer relationships (DoorDash 2025). This does not establish that these capabilities will be integrated into Wolt in Finland. It does, however, illustrate the strategic value of coordinating more forms of how customers discover, select, experience, and return to hospitality businesses.

Uber approaches this territory from another direction by combining mobility and delivery. In July 2026, Uber announced a voluntary conditional takeover offer for Delivery Hero, the parent company of Foodora. Uber stated that, if completed, the transaction would increase the number of markets in which it offers both mobility and delivery services from 34 to 58 (Uber 2026).

The portfolios differ, but the competitive logic is similar. Each seeks to make its interface relevant across more occasions while relying on different actors and technologies for fulfilment. For restaurants, this creates an important asymmetry. Restaurants may continue to own their premises, brands, recipes, staff, and inventory, while another organisation increasingly shapes the environment in which demand is discovered, compared, routed, paid for, evaluated, and repeated. In other words, strategic control can shift towards the platform without a corresponding shift in ownership of the assets that produce the food service (Gawer 2021).

Interface sovereignty

When an order is placed through a platform, the restaurant makes the meal, but the platform controls the transaction interface. This creates a practical tension between platform access and interface sovereignty.

Platform access means the customers, sales opportunities, logistics, payment infrastructure, and visibility that a restaurant can reach through an intermediary. Here, interface sovereignty means how much control the restaurant retains over its customer relationships and activities while using that access. Greater reliance on platform access can increase the restaurant’s immediate ability to reach customers while reducing its direct influence over how those customers are reached, recognised, and retained (Ashton, Tuomi & Backman 2023; Ou, Zhang & Neslin 2026).

Interface dependence grows when more of the activities that attract customers and encourage them to return take place through an interface the restaurant does not control. Discovery, comparison, trust formation, payment, fulfilment expectations, customer recognition, and repeat selection can progressively become organised elsewhere.

The intermediary then does more than serve existing demand. It can also influence which restaurants customers see, compare, trust, and ultimately choose. Research on transaction platforms similarly shows that platform owners can act as both rule-makers and economic participants, influencing how complementors and consumers interact (Tang & Yin 2026).

Interfaces are therefore not neutral shelves. Rankings, filters, recommendations, promotions, reviews, and delivery estimates shape what customers notice, compare, trust, and expect. These choices influence how demand is distributed among restaurants.

Research on on-demand food delivery has similarly examined how platforms use algorithmic management to coordinate interactions among customers, restaurants, and couriers (Tuomi et al. 2023). Research on platform urbanism further shows how delivery platforms connect algorithms, labour, logistics, information, and physical space, influencing how consumers, merchants, and couriers encounter the city (Farhangi, Rohracher & Meurling 2025; Palacios Crisóstomo & Kaufmann 2024; Quarles & Simon 2025).

The issue, then, is not whether a restaurant uses a platform, but what it remains able to do while using it. Interface sovereignty does not require owning every channel or avoiding intermediaries. For managerial purposes, interface sovereignty can be assessed through four connected areas.

• Customer recognition concerns whether restaurants can understand who returns, what drives repeat behaviour, and how demand through platforms relates to demand through their own channels.
• Experience authorship concerns which elements of the restaurant’s brand promise remain under the restaurant operator’s control when the platform shapes presentation, timing, price cues, handover, and service recovery.
• Relationship continuity concerns whether a customer acquired through a platform can develop an ongoing relationship with the restaurant, within platform rules and data-protection requirements.
• Strategic optionality concerns whether the restaurant could adapt if commissions, rankings, contractual terms, fulfilment models, or consumer habits changed.

These capabilities can reinforce one another. Customer recognition helps the restaurant learn about repeat behaviour. That learning can support a more distinctive service and experience, giving customers reasons to return and potentially strengthening relationship continuity. Stronger continuity can reduce the need to reacquire the same customer through the platform and preserve strategic optionality. The reverse can also occur. When restaurants know little about returning customers, they may learn less from repeat behaviour. This can make differentiation harder and increase dependence on platform visibility. Interface sovereignty can therefore strengthen or erode over time depending on how these capabilities are maintained while platforms are used.

The challenge is therefore not to maximise control or minimise platform use. Platforms may perform specialised functions more efficiently than individual restaurants can, and interdependence can create substantial value. The critical issue is which capabilities can be delegated, and which must remain strong enough for the restaurant to rebuild or adapt if conditions change.

Managers should ask who controls the capabilities that connect the restaurant with its customers and whether growing reliance on the platform is shifting those capabilities towards the intermediary. They should also ask whether the restaurant could still adapt if the relationship changed.

Managerial implications

For restaurant managers, the first implication is to evaluate platforms in terms of customer relationships, rather than individual orders alone. A profitable platform order does not, by itself, reveal whether the underlying customer relationship is becoming valuable. If customers who once purchased directly are repeatedly reacquired through a commission-bearing intermediary, current revenue can remain attractive while relationship continuity and strategic optionality weaken. Managers therefore need to distinguish incremental demand, channel migration, repeat behaviour, and contribution margin across dine-in, takeaway, direct digital sales, and third-party platforms.

Restaurants should also balance platform access with the capabilities they need to retain. Platforms provide reach, convenience, and operational flexibility, while restaurants need reasons for customers to recognise and return to them through experiences they can directly shape, including in-person hospitality, direct reservations, loyalty programmes, service recovery, and consent-based communication.

The objective is to avoid becoming an interchangeable production unit behind another organisation’s customer interface. This tension is consistent with research showing that delivery platforms can expand market access while changing restaurants’ control over customer relationships, data, differentiation, and revenue (Ou, Zhang & Neslin 2026).

Operational and customer data should be treated as strategic infrastructure. Managers need a unified view of demand to determine whether platform growth represents genuine business growth, a shift of existing customers from direct channels to platforms, or a change in the cost of acquiring customers. Dashboards should therefore connect channel profitability with repeat behaviour, customer acquisition, data access, fulfilment quality, and concentration risk.

Fulfilment should likewise be managed through a mix of delivery options rather than as a choice between direct and platform delivery. Managers should determine which service promises require direct control, which delivery activities can safely be outsourced without weakening those promises, and where alternative fulfilment options improve service quality and organisational adaptability.

Platform dependence therefore deserves governance attention comparable to other forms of strategic concentration risk. Management teams should periodically review revenue concentration, visibility dependence, customer recognition, data access, contractual exposure, the availability of alternative fulfilment options, and the consequences of losing access to a major interface.

The objective is not independence for its own sake. It is to maintain sufficient alternatives and capabilities so that current convenience does not become a future constraint.

Restaurants do not need to own every channel, transaction, or delivery resource. They do need to decide which capabilities can be delegated or shared, and which must remain strong enough to preserve customer recognition, learning, experience, relationship continuity, and choice.

The central question is whether restaurants can continue to learn, adapt, maintain customer relationships, and preserve meaningful alternatives while depending on platforms. Interface sovereignty is therefore the capacity to benefit from platform access without surrendering those capabilities.

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