68 Funny Or Infuriating Food Delivery Fails That Might Inspire You To Cook Something At Home

To be clear, we have a lot of empathy for food delivery drivers. Their jobs are tough, they are constantly under pressure, they often have to deal with customer rudeness, and their pay often isn’t stellar. However, the simple truth is that not all drivers are hard-working and ethical. Some are trying to ‘game’ the system by rushing orders without caring about customer satisfaction. And while everyone makes mistakes, not every mistake is equal. Some are worse than others.

It is an understatement to claim that the online food delivery industry is big. It is humongous, on a global scale. Around the world, the industry—which encompasses both meal and grocery delivery—reached nearly $1.4 trillion (yes, that’s ‘trillion’ with a ‘t’) in 2025.

The leading food delivery markets are China and the United States, followed by India, the United Kingdom, and Japan, Statista reports.

This sector has seen massive growth since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The lockdowns and quarantines forced many people to stay at home. So, the demand for meal and grocery deliveries spiked.

Currently, around 3 billion people use online food delivery services (yes, you are, in fact, reading that right). Around two-thirds of these customers live in Asia.

Grocery deliveries are growing the quickest and have now, somewhat surprisingly, outpaced meal deliveries!

Unfortunately, there are tons of problems associated with food deliveries. Careless and rude drivers are just the tip of the iceberg. Some issues are systemic.

For example, China is dealing with predatory pricing and merchant coercion in the sector. So, the country is now moving to end “‘irrational’ food-delivery subsidies and the sector’s price wars,” according to the South China Morning Post.

Under the old system in China, everyone was losing out, including the customers, delivery drivers, and businesses.

Recently, Chinese authorities introduced draft regulations aimed at cracking down on the misuse of subsidies by food delivery platforms that were fueling immense competition. Basically, some platforms were using subsidies and selling goods at a loss to disrupt the market.

“China’s food-delivery platforms exhibit problems such as using capital advantages to seize market share, coercing businesses on their platforms into taking part in subsidies, and triggering irrational competition in the industry,” the regulator said.

Basically, food delivery platforms in China will no longer be allowed to force merchants to take part in subsidy activities. What’s more, the goal is to prevent the platforms from unfair or monopolistic competition.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that Chinese authorities are also tackling ‘ghost kitchens,’ which are restaurants that appear on apps but don’t actually exist. The issue is that these ghost kitchens outsource their orders to third-party vendors. The latter then fulfil them at lower costs. Meanwhile, the merchants maximize profits by keeping prices down.

The main issue here is that these low prices come at the cost of food safety.

As per the BBC, food delivery apps in China will need to verify their restaurants’ licenses and addresses. In short, the online listing has to match the physical business. Moreover, apps will have to note whether they offer dine-in services.

Intense scrutiny of the industry started in 2025, when a Beijing-based customer complained about a cake topped with inedible flowers. The product, which he ordered via a food delivery app, was unsatisfactory.

Officials who began digging into the issue found that the cake chain listed nearly 380 locations on e-commerce platforms and did not have even one physical store. What’s more, its online shops allegedly forged business licenses.

As the investigation continued, officials found that the cake chain accepted orders, transferred them to a different platform, outsourced the orders to third-party vendors, and picked the lowest bids.

Of course, this chain wasn’t the only problem. The investigation found 67,000 ‘ghost shops’ across seven major food delivery apps. Together with the order-transfer sites, these shops “formed an illegal supply chain through mutual collusion,” as reported by Xinhua.

Seven e-commerce platforms were fined 3.6bn yuan, mostly over ghost kitchen deliveries. The result is that some businesses are embracing top-tier transparency to gain consumers’ trust over food safety. For example, over 20 takeout stalls in Hangzhou installed ‘transparent kitchens’ with live broadcasting features. They allow customers to see how their food is prepared in real time.

Meanwhile, in India, food delivery drivers are facing an unprecedented amount of stress. Their jobs have, frankly, become incredibly dangerous as they are forced to fulfil mind-bogglingly short delivery times. For example, many people living in big Indian cities have become used to rapid deliveries of groceries, drinks, books, tech, etc., within mere minutes.

“Unlike traditional retailers, platforms such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto don't deliver from large supermarkets or distant warehouses. Instead, they operate out of small storage units embedded deep inside residential neighbourhoods,” the BBC writes.

These so-called ‘dark stores’ are what allow delivery drivers to reach customers’ homes in minutes. There, workers pick, scan, and pack items that are meticulously kept on shelves and in freezers, and then hand the paper bags off to the delivery drivers.