Eat My Globe

The Origins of Food Delivery

Simon Majumdar (“SM”):

Hey, April.

April Simpson (“AS”):

Yeah, Simon.

SM:

What did the pizza say to the box?

AS:

I don’t know Simon. What did the pizza say to the box?

SM:

You got me covered.

AS:

Oh my gracious. So cheesy.

SM:

Oh.

[Laughter]

I can see you’re getting into it now. After 15 seasons.

AS:

[Laughter]

SM:

Anyway.

INTRO MUSIC

Hi everybody.

My name is Simon Majumdar and welcome to Eat My Globe, a podcast about things you didn’t know you didn’t know about food.

And on today’s episode, we’re going to be looking at the origins of food delivery. That’s right. Those wonderful people who drop of fried chicken, Chinese food – and those delicious pork ribs – and pizza.

In modern terms, people will often say that food delivery and take-out – or take-away as it’s known in Britain – are the same thing. So, just to be clear, take-out is, as our old chums at Merriam-Webster say,

Quote

“of, or relating to, selling, or being food not to be consumed on the premises.”

End quote.

And from personal experience ordering food for takeout, the food is freshly cooked and there are no additional fees other than the price of the food.

Online food delivery, on the other hand, means, according to the authors from the International Journal of Hospitality Management as

Quote

“refer[ing] to online channel that consumers use to order food from restaurants and fast-food retailers.”

End quote.

The authors also note that food delivery may be delivered by the restaurants themselves or third parties.

Again, from my personal experience, food delivery involves the customer waiting for the food to be delivered where the food may not be delivered immediately. Also, it’s customary to provide the delivery person a tip or gratuity.

For the restaurant or third-party delivery platforms, food delivery may lead to increased revenue. In the United States alone, this sector would be a $353 Billion dollar industry. Which is an amazing amount.

It will be this sector – that of the food delivery and online delivery systems – that we are going to be looking at today.

For those of you who think that food delivery is a modern invention, one only needs to look at ancient Roman society in the blighted area of Pompeii, which was buried in the ashes of Mount Vesuvius in CE 79. Recently discovered there was a Roman version of a snack stall or fast-food operation known as a “Thermopolium.” This word comes from the Greek words, “thermos,” which means hot, and “poleo,” which means to sell.

Although this may seem more like a restaurant, it showed that the ancient Romans, many who did not have space for an oven in their living quarters, needed a place where they could get ready-made food. They served dishes that included ingredients like pork, goat, fish, snails, and fava beans.

Quote

“Lentils, meat, cheese, and a type of warmed spice wine called calida were all staples.”

End quote.

But what about delivering food itself?

In China, during the Southern Song Dynasty around the years 1127 to 1279, the restaurants there had

Quote

“24-hour meals and drink delivery services.”

End quote.

According to the government of Hangzhou in China,

Quote

“Archaeologists discovered that people in the Southern Song Dynasty used a thick-bottomed plate with a double-layered hollow inside. One or two round holes are pierced on the top of the plate to inject hot water and ensure that food is still warm when it arrives.”

End quote.

Which is amazing.

And in the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911, restaurants delivered dishes in a picnic container to the waterfronts for people to pick up.

So, yeah, Chinese food delivery has been going on forever.

Meanwhile, in Korea, it looks like a diarist called Hwang Yun-Seok wrote that, in July 1768, he ordered a buckwheat noodle dish for delivery after he finished an exam. For the record, that noodle dish is called naengmyun. It was, apparently, very popular with the aristocrats. So much so that the dish got delivered to them.   

In Japan, it looks like a form of food delivery started around the Edo period of 1603 to 1868. That’s when roving entrepreneurs sold food – like noodles, grilled eel and more – by balancing the dishes on sticks on their shoulders and sold them to people.

Similarly, in England, during the time of the Restoration period, so-called because it restored the monarchy and which covered the period from King Charles II came to the throne in 1660 to the end of his reign in 1685, “hawkers” also sold food like fruits, vegetables and fish by going to people’s homes or sold them in the streets to people by often carrying their wares on their head. According to Londonist, this method of carrying food left

Quote

“the food horribly exposed to birds and ejected liquids from above.”

End quote.

I’ll leave you to ponder what liquids from above might mean.

By the Victorian period, William Mayhew, a journalist and one of the most influential writers of the time and who lived from 1812 to 1887, wrote about London food delivery in his seminal four-volume work, “London Labour and the London Poor,” published from 1851 to 1862. The delivery was not necessarily of a cooked dish but of meat.

Quote

“sent their boys or men on fast trotting horses to take orders from the dwellers in the suburbs, which were away from the shop thoroughfares, and afterwards to deliver the orders—still travelling on horseback—at the customer’s door.”

End quote.

Perhaps one of the most famous incidences of food delivery would occur in Italy in the 19^th century.

Italy became a country on March the 17^th 1861 with Victor Emmanuel II as the first “King of Italy.” Before that, many areas including Florence, Naples, Milan and Genoa, were independent states. So, yes, technically speaking, the country of the United States is older than the country of Italy. Interesting stuff.

In 1878, Umberto I became the second king of Italy. His wife, Margherita Teresa Giovanna of Savoy, was also known as Queen Margherita.

The legend says that, in 1889, Queen Margherita and King Umberto visited Naples. At the time, French cuisine was de rigueur for royalty so that’s what the Neapolitans served them. Unfortunately, the Queen supposedly got bored of the French cuisine during their visit. So, their courtiers called a local chef called Raffaele Esposito to bring food. Raffaele was the chef or Pizzaiolo of Pizzeria Brandi which specialized, as the name suggests, in pizza.

Raffaele delivered three types of pizzas – one with lard, basil and caciocavallo, which is a type of cheese; a second pizza made with anchovies; and a third pizza made with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. The Queen apparently loved this last pizza, and Raffaele named this pizza the Margherita Pizza in her honor.

Incidentally or not, this Margherita Pizza contains the colors of the flag of the new country of Italy – basil is green, mozzarella is white, and tomatoes are red.

The legend continues that Raffaele asked for a note from the Queen to place a royal endorsement for his pizzas which, as I have seen, is still there.

Now, historians have argued that this was just a legend, but whether it is true or not, it is a great story. And in any case, Pizzeria Brandi is still there and still telling the story.

One year after Raffaele supposedly delivered pizza to the Queen, in 1890, in Mumbai, India, another food delivery began to happen. Mahadeo Havaji Bachche was your regular worker during the British Raj who just wanted to have a home cooked meal during his lunch break. So, one day, he hired someone to bring over his tiffin from his house.

A tiffin is, according to Merriam-Webster,

Quote

“a light midday meal.”

End quote.

This word was taken from a British term that meant,

Quote

“alteration of tiffing, gerund of obsolete English tiff to eat between meals.”

End quote.

The British first started tiffing during the colonial times in India where they skipped lunch because it was so hot and so they only had a light snack around 3 pm.

Anyway, Bachche was so pleased with his tiffin delivery he started a business. He hired 100 men – who later became known as dabbawallas – and who delivered meals from the workers’ home to the workers’ office every day.

“Dabbawala” means

Quote

“ones who carry the box.”

End quote.

More than 135 years after Bachche started his unique food delivery business, this type of food delivery is still thriving in India. As Eshita Bhargava puts it in the Times Now News

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“Mumbai’s dabbawalas are the city’s unsung lifeline, delivering over 200,000 home-cooked lunches daily with 99.99% accuracy—come rain, riots, or rail delays.”

End quote.

Dabbawalas deliver these meals to workers in a cylindrical steel container that carry their meal and even maybe a dessert. These containers are called tiffin boxes or dabbas. There are over 5,000 dabbawalas who cover the city on bicycles after collecting their dabbas for each person from the railway station.

I have been in offices with my uncle in Mumbai as dabbawalas deliver these tiffins at exactly 1pm. It is an extraordinary sight.

Again, as Eshita Bhargava puts it

Quote

“Each tiffin is marked with a system of colour-coded letters, numbers and symbols—denoting collection point, train station, destination building, floor, and sometimes even the desk.”

End quote.

And the error rate? Apparently, one per 16 million food deliveries. Astonishing.

So, for all office workers out there, be inspired by Mahadeo Havaji Bachche who created a hugely popular and unique business because he just wanted to have a home cooked meal delivered to his office desk.

This is the point where I wanted to give a huge shout out to David Colling for his suggestion that we should also feature a wonderful organization by the name of “Meals on Wheels” on the podcast. So here goes.

Meals on Wheels is a program that helps address hunger and isolation in the elderly and infirm population. It is believed that the very first mention of this term, “Meals on Wheels,” appeared on October the 28th, 1943 in the Welwyn Times in England. And by December 1943, the first Meals on Wheels food delivery occurred in Welwyn Gaden City, again, in England where British restaurants prepared the food and members of the Women’s Volunteer Service delivered the food.

What prompted this food delivery?

There was a flu epidemic happening and so the food delivery was meant to help the elderly and the ill. It kept on going because

Quote

“it was a ‘Job well worth doing because it partly fills a badly felt need.’”

End quote.

This food delivery program was also brought on by the Blitz, which was a concentrated barrage of German bombs that hit primarily London from September the 7th, 1940 to May 11th, 1941 during World War II. During that eight-month period, nearly 43,000 people were killed. It also left many elderly people desperate to be fed, which “Meals on Wheels” was trying to rectify.

In 1956, Meals on Wheels delivered over one million meals. By 1962, Meals on Wheels served over 4 million meals.

It is, perhaps, a very British thing that when asked how the name came about, Lady Reading, the founder of the Women’s Volunteer Service that started Meals on Wheels, suggested that it was

Quote

“Given its name over lunch at her home by her driver.”

End quote.

By 1954, Meals on Wheels had been established in the United States in Philadelphia by Margaret Toy. The US Meals on Wheels now serves over 2,000,000 people in the country per year. It has 5,000 providers throughout the country.

Meals on Wheels is also in Canada, Australia, and many other countries. A wonderful organization.

Not bad for something that was named by Lady Reading’s driver.

Let’s move on and talk about one of my favorite food deliveries as it is in many countries including the U.S.A. and the U.K. – Chinese food delivery. I’ve briefly touched on its history earlier but now let’s talk about its modern iteration.

In 1922, a Los Angeles restaurant, Kin-Chu Café, began advertising in the newspaper that it was

Quote

“The only place on the West Coast making and delivering real Chinese dishes.”

End quote.

And they delivered from 11 am to 1 am. Wow.

It’s interesting to note that the Chinese food delivery boxes – you know the one – where it is a paper folded box – is all American. It was invented in the US in 1894 to be used for something else entirely. On November the 13th, 1894, a Chicago man called Frederick Weeks Wilcox patented these boxes not to carry Chinese food but to create oyster pails meant to carry oysters. Isn’t that interesting?

Anyway, by the 1970s, someone put a pagoda design on these boxes and they’ve been connected with Chinese food delivery since.

It’s something I recall seeing on many television shows when I was a child in the U.K. These Chinese food delivery boxes were so synonymous that it told me what I was watching was from the U.S.A. Even now, when I receive a Chinese take-out here in the U.S, I still feel a little shiver whenever I open a carton of fried rice or chow mein.

By 1994, the internet was in its nascent period, but even then it began to have an impact on food delivery. Pizza Hut, the famous pizza establishment, began to advertise their pizzas on a website called PizzaNet for customers in Santa Cruz, California. It seemed to me though that ordering was a bit complicated. Here was the process. A customer viewed the menu via the internet then entered their order. That order was sent to the headquarters in Wichita, Kansas then directed to the local Pizza Hut via the internet. Then, the local Pizza Hut would verify the order with the customer via a phone call. The customer paid on delivery. It was an early attempt at online food ordering and delivery, for sure.

In 1995, two MIT and Stanford University Business School graduates, Michael Adelberg and Craig Cohen, created a website to allow customers in Silicon Valley to order food online from various restaurants for takeout or delivery. They called their website “World Wide Waiter” although they have since renamed it “Waiter.” Customers went on their website, chose a restaurant, put in their order and payment information, and chose delivery or pick up. But the orders were relayed to the restaurants via fax. Again, early days of the internet. But they claim to be the first of its kind to offer online ordering and restaurant food delivery.

And it does seem that Waiter’s business model can still be found in popular apps today. In 1999, SeamlessWeb launched in New York. And in 2011, SeamlessWeb merged with GrubHub, which was founded in 2004 in Chicago. Thereafter, DoorDash was created in 2013, and UberEats in 2014.

These online ordering and food delivery websites or apps meant that the restaurants don’t need to have the infrastructure to deliver food. They just need facilities to prepare the food.

Which brings us to the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you recall, we were all under “stay at home” orders, which prompted many people to have their groceries or their meals delivered.

In 2025, takeout, delivery, and drive through dining has, according to the Chief Economist at the National Restaurant Association,

Quote

“become a key revenue driver and an essential way to engage consumers . . . It now accounts for a larger share of sales for 58% of limited-service and 41% of full-service operators compared with 2019—providing a critical path to restaurant resilience and growth despite ongoing economic pressures.”

End quote.

This meant for many restaurants who previously did not deliver they now had to do so through third party distribution or by themselves. After all, as the National Restaurant Association found in 2025,

Quote

“37% of adults order delivery once a week. . . [and] More than 6 in 10 of younger adults say they use takeout, drive-thru and delivery more often now than they did a year ago.”

End quote.

So finally, let’s see some of the worldwide figures for food delivery.

China was the largest food delivery market in the world in 2024 with the US coming in second. Also in 2024, UberEats was the most popular food delivery app in the world, while in the US, DoorDash was more popular.

My own feeling on food delivery is it is a great thing although one must also see the degradation of the food from what is served in the restaurant to what appears at home.

Also, there are styles of food which are much more suited to the delivery system. It is always fun to eat a Chinese delivery when you are watching television with your family or friends, while arguing who gets the last pork rib and to eat a burger while “arguing” about the result of the sporting occasion on television. One just needs to choose carefully.

But above all, please remember to tip your driver or delivery person who work as hard as anybody to get that food to you in all weathers, okay? They are the heroes of food delivery.

See you next week folks.

OUTRO MUSIC

SM:

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Thank you and goodbye from me, Simon Majumdar, we’ll speak to you soon on the next episode of EAT MY GLOBE: Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Food.

CREDITS

The EAT MY GLOBE Podcast is a production of “It’s Not Much But It’s Ours” and “Producer Girl Productions.”

We would also like to thank Sybil Villanueva for all of her help both with the editing of the transcripts and her essential help with the research.