QSRs Face Their Amazon Moment

How delivery platforms are reshaping quick service restaurants, and what leaders must do now 

DoorDash and Uber Eats now control 85 percent of U.S. online food delivery. At many QSR chains, third-party orders represent 20 to 30 percent of sales, a share that keeps growing even as traffic softens and steep discounting compresses profitability. That dependence extracts a toll: commissions squeeze margin while customer data flows to the platform rather than the restaurant. Aggregators have become too big to ignore, too costly to embrace fully, and too entrenched to negotiate on equal terms. 
 

Retail faced this moment a decade ago. When Borders outsourced its online bookstore to Amazon in 2001, the decision seemed logical. E-commerce was a fraction of total revenue. By 2015, Borders was gone, and Amazon was on the agenda of every retail board meeting. The math had become punishing: walking away from the platform meant losing access to a growing share of demand but staying meant funding a competitor's expansion. The risk was not e-commerce itself, but ceding customer ownership, economics, and execution control to a platform at the same moment it became central to demand. 
 

Sit in any QSR management meeting today and the parallels are clear, but so is a crucial difference. It took Amazon 15 years to capture 40 percent of U.S. e-commerce, while DoorDash and Uber Eats consolidated the US online delivery market nearly twice as fast. The window for response is narrower. 
 

Platforms have already reshaped the industry. The question is which brands will act before the window closes. 

Reclaiming control
 

The brands gaining ground are making choices that run counter to conventional industry thinking. Three deliberate moves across operations, marketing, and store portfolio are proving most effective. 
 

Operations: Own the peaks
 

Platforms now offer white-label fulfillment. DoorDash Drive and Uber Direct let restaurants outsource delivery even for orders placed through their own apps, dispatching gig drivers on the brand's behalf. The model appears sound: variable costs, no driver management, no fleet overhead. 
 

The reality is more complicated. Third-party drivers work multiple apps, chasing the best payouts. When dinner rush coincides with surge pricing elsewhere, orders sit. AlixPartners' analysis finds aggregator-fulfilled orders arrive five minutes slower than first-party deliveries during peak windows, with satisfaction scores 13 points lower. 
 

For QSRs such as large pizza chains with dedicated fleets, the strategic question is how to balance cost and control. Third-party delivery costs roughly $2 less per order, a meaningful margin advantage. Yet that savings erodes quickly if applied indiscriminately, given peak periods are when brand reputation is built or lost. The answer for most brands is a hybrid model: first-party delivery at peak times to protect customer experience, third-party delivery at non-peak to protect cost. 
 

Domino's represents one extreme: first-party fulfillment for all orders, regardless of origin or order time. When it partnered with Uber Eats and DoorDash, it negotiated terms ensuring Domino's drivers fulfill every delivery. The platforms provide incremental demand; Domino's maintain operational control.
 

Of course, not every brand has or needs Domino's delivery infrastructure. For those fully reliant on third-party delivery, the principle is the same even if the levers differ: kitchen throughput, order accuracy, and handoff speed determine whether the brand experience survives the last mile during peak times. A perfectly staged order gives even a gig driver the best chance to deliver on the brand promise. 
 

Own the peaks, outsource the margins, and never cede control of the brand-defining moments. 

Marketing: Reclaim the relationship 
 

QSR marketing leaders often describe aggregator promotions as "easy money" because platform visibility and order count tend to move in tandem. But there is a critical distinction: platform marketing is promotional spending, not brand-building. Every dollar spent on a platform discount or placement fee further dilutes margin on already thin orders, while doing nothing to build the affinity that platforms are eroding. 
 

The trap is self-reinforcing. The more a brand spends on platform promotions, the more customers learn to find and order through the aggregator. Over time, the relationship transfers from the brand to the platform, and unwinding that dependency becomes increasingly expensive.
 

The window may be narrower than expected: AlixPartners' Restaurant Consumer Outlook shows that loyalty program influence, after a decade of steady growth, has flattened in 2025. Points-based programs alone are no longer sufficient to overcome platform convenience. 
 

The brands building durable positions are shifting investment toward first-party channels: innovative loyalty programs, app-exclusive offers, and direct engagement. Chipotle grew its loyalty program from 8 million in 2019 to 40 million members in 2023 by making rewards exclusive to direct ordering. The goal is not to abandon aggregators but to treat them as customer-acquisition channels, with a deliberate path back to owned relationships that protect margins and brand equity. 
 

Store portfolio: Toward a healthy fleet
 

The benefits of location and dense physical store coverage have diminished in a delivery-dominated environment that has steadily taken share from walk-ins and drive-throughs. 
 

What matters now is a healthy fleet that can consistently execute. In our experience, top-quartile stores in a typical QSR system generate three to four times the contribution margin of bottom-quartile locations, yet development teams often treat the portfolio as undifferentiated, spreading investment across performers and laggards alike. 
 

The most effective franchisors we advise are rethinking development strategies by segmenting stores into distinct cohorts and developing tailored action plans for each: targeted investment for high performers, operational interventions for fixable underperformers, and proactive exit strategies for locations that cannot be turned around. For some brands, this means shrinking before growing, a difficult message for boards accustomed to unit-count growth as the headline metric. 
 

A smaller, healthier fleet creates compounding advantages: it attracts stronger franchisees who see a system that values profitability over vanity metrics, it appeals to capital market investors increasingly focused on unit economics rather than store counts, and it generates the store-level cash flow needed to invest in digital capabilities that will define competitive advantage in the years ahead. 
 

The window is open
 

Retail's Amazon moment produced clear winners and losers, and the difference was timing. Brands that recognized the threat early and invested in transformation survived and in some cases thrived. Those that waited became cautionary tales swept up as Amazon expanded to control roughly 40 percent of U.S. e-commerce. 
 

QSRs can learn from that history. Brands that maintain control of the brand experience, build direct customer relationships, and optimize fleets for profitability will create separation that compounds over time.
 

Industry shifts are decided at such inflection points, before momentum becomes irreversible. For QSR, that time is now. 

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