At Mosch Mosch it is getting too tight at the entrance.

There are now four terminals in each of the four noodle bar branches in Frankfurt, says managing director Matthias Schönberger.

They are needed for the four delivery services with which the restaurant chain already works;

this is where the orders come in and are then billed.

Now a fifth terminal is to be added: Uber Eats, the delivery division of the American travel agency group Uber, also wants to deliver menus on the Main and in Munich from August onwards.

Uber Eats started doing it a few weeks ago in Berlin.

Mosch Mosch also wants to try out the service, initially for three months.

And it will certainly not stay with the five providers: Others have already announced their entry into the German market.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Half a year ago, the offer was extremely clear: Anyone who wanted to enjoy a restaurant meal again by the end of 2020 despite the Corona lockdown, could hardly get past the delivery monopoly Lieferando, which belongs to the Dutch company Just Eat Takeaway.

Just in order to be listed on its website, which is often the first to be displayed by search engines due to the high number of hits, restaurant operators usually have to transfer 13 percent of every order to Lieferando, even if the restaurants then use their own drivers.

If you also use the company's suppliers, around 30 percent are charged.

Lots of searches for delivery services

But this seemed inevitable, especially in times of pandemic: In 2020, as many searches for delivery services were made in Frankfurt as in no other major German city, the Savoo voucher portal recently announced. There were an average of 184,000 Internet searches per month. Before the pandemic, there were around 1,500 restaurants, pubs and snack bars in the city.

As the Mosch-Mosch managing director reports, the delivery service generated around 80 percent of its sales during the lockdown phases, the rest was accounted for by orders that customers picked up themselves. The chain partly uses its own drivers and partly those of the delivery service. “Lieferando was a textbook monopoly,” says Schönberger. In the worst case, deliveries would have taken well over an hour, and affected customers would rarely have ordered from Mosch Mosch again, even if the chain itself was unable to do anything. In the pandemic, Lieferando was not able to hire drivers as quickly as the orders in Frankfurt increased from week to week.

But the situation has changed: Not only the Finnish delivery service Wolt now has its own fleet of drivers on the Main, two Frankfurt startups are also involved in the lucrative market: the company Eatura from the Bahnhofsviertel and "Essen Ready" from the operator of the Gerbermühle restaurant.

The American delivery company Doordash has already advertised jobs in Germany, and Delivery Hero also wants to return after its subsidiary Lieferheld was sold to Lieferando two years ago.

There are also the new supermarket delivery services such as Gorilla, Flink and the local startup Grovy.

Service and speed

In terms of price, restaurant delivery services have so far differed little, after all, expansion, marketing and, last but not least, the drivers have to be paid for.

That is why they try to set themselves apart from each other in terms of service and speed.

You hardly have to wait more than an hour.

Especially since the market is shrinking again: Since the end of the lockdown, significantly more customers have come to the restaurants, last week Mosch Mosch once again generated around 80 percent of its sales in the dining rooms, reports Schönberger.

However, he still does not want to do without the delivery services: "I see it as a business that I would not have without them."