Online grocery much harder than delivery
Former corp dev at a European on-demand unicorn on dark store unit economics
The core problem is that online grocery adds warehouse labor and inventory risk to a business that already has expensive last mile delivery. In food delivery, the restaurant cooks and packs the order and the platform mainly coordinates demand and drivers. In online grocery, the operator also pays people to pick and pack items, ties up cash in inventory, absorbs spoilage on fresh goods, and often chases low basket orders with discounts, which makes each order much harder to push into positive contribution margin.
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Basket size is the make or break variable. Research on dark store economics points to about $50 as the rough threshold for a typical online grocery order to work economically, while quick commerce often trends toward much smaller convenience baskets unless operators enforce order minimums.
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Food delivery has a built in economic advantage because restaurants supply the food and pay commissions on each order. The interview notes restaurant commissions are the biggest revenue source for food platforms, while grocery operators instead own the inventory and earn thinner retail style margins on bananas, milk, and other staples.
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The operational bottleneck is fresh food. Dark stores can improve economics with direct sourcing and better forecasting, but once assortment shifts toward produce, dairy, and meat, spoilage and forecasting errors rise fast. That is why the stronger long term fit is often convenience items and non perishables, not the full weekly grocery basket.
The market is heading toward a split. Full basket online grocery will consolidate around operators with real supply chain depth, high order density, and enough scale to buy better and waste less. Faster dark store models will keep moving toward convenience retail, where speed matters more, spoilage is lower, and the economics look more like a digital 7-Eleven than a digital supermarket.