AI for food delivery in 2026: 15 tools that help you stop working for the aggregator

MRKT.ERA·6 min

Aggregator commission is 20–35%, packaging takes 4–7% of revenue, and then there are platform discounts. With food cost at 32%, a 30% commission and 5% packaging, about a third of the order is left, and payroll, rent and taxes still come out of it. More orders do not mean more money. Below are the services that show the real margin of delivery and bring customers back to your own channel, with links.

What an order actually earns

Without a 10–20% delivery markup or separate bundles for the platform, the aggregator earns more from your kitchen than you do. Calculate the margin of every item after commission and packaging at least once a month, because platform terms and promotions keep changing.

20–35%

aggregator commission in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania

4–7%

packaging as a share of delivery revenue

≈ 33%

of the order left before payroll, rent and taxes, at 32% food cost, 30% commission and 5% packaging

Your menu on the platform sells less than it could

Customers decide in seconds based on the photo and the first line of the description. Listings without photos and with a dry list of ingredients lose to competitors, even with the same food.

The customer belongs to the aggregator

The platform does not give you the customer's phone number or order history, and you pay commission again on every repeat order. The fix: your own ordering channel plus a flyer in the bag with a code for the first direct order. Running your own delivery pays off from roughly 25–30 orders a day per courier; below that, your own channel plus pickup makes more sense.

Complaints and refunds

It arrived cold, it was late, the sauce was wrong. An AI chat handles routine questions, and once a week complaints are grouped by cause: if 40% of complaints are about delivery time in one district, the fix is in logistics.

Where off-the-shelf tools stop

A commission spreadsheet answers the question once a month. A delivery owner needs the answer every morning: which channel brought in money and which only brought in gross sales, which items on the platform sell at a loss.

ERA Daily does this breakdown: it connects to your POS, accounts for each aggregator's commission and shows money after commission, not gross sales. Write to us and we will show it on your data.

Key Takeaways

01A 20–35% commission and 4–7% packaging eat most of an order's margin
02Export your Glovo, Wolt and Bolt Food dashboards and calculate item margin after commission every month
03Without a 10–20% markup or platform bundles, the aggregator earns more than you
04Photoroom and AI descriptions improve menu listings without a photographer
05Your own Telegram bot or ordering site plus a flyer in the bag brings customers back to you
06Your own delivery pays off from roughly 25–30 orders a day per courier

AI agents for business: bookkeeping, content, SEO

We build AI for a specific task: bookkeeping from receipt photos, copy and videos, review replies, an SEO blog, a morning report for the owner. We connect it to your systems and support it after launch.

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