Ding-dong! Dinner is served. On any given evening, thousands of doorbells up and down the country herald the arrival of a takeaway. While we might pride ourselves on being a nation of home cooks, modern Britain has a taste for take-out; a 2022 survey found one in five of us order a delivery at least once a month, while 11 per cent get one daily.
Over the past decade, delivery culture has exploded in the UK. From 2017, the takeaway market was growing at 1.4 per cent per year. Perhaps lockdown fuelled the habit: sales surged by 315 per cent between February 2020 and February 2021, and they haven’t slowed since.
Takeaways were never a part of my childhood where I grew up in Lancashire. We simply lived too far out. To this day, two of the market leaders, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, despite now covering 77 and 90 per cent of the UK population respectively, do not deliver to my childhood home. Top dog Just Eat, which has 19 million users globally and claims to deliver to 97 per cent of UK addresses, can offer my parents a choice of just 11 outlets, compared to the 117 available at my London flat.
- Daily Telegraph. To read the full story click here
