Five Brazilian restaurant chains join forces to fight inflated delivery fees from iFood, Rappi, Uber Eats & Co

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil’s antitrust agency, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) on Thursday, July 16, unrestrictedly approved a partnership between companies in the food sector – such as Outback, Dominos, Giraffas, Bobs and Rei do Mate – to create and operate a delivery platform.

The approval was published in the Federal Gazette. The new service, called Quiq, will enable all delivery or take away orders to be organized in a single place, thereby reducing costs that restaurants have with platforms such as iFood, Rappi and Uber Eats.

The companies also explained that their businesses would continue to operate “independently,” and would not lead to competitive effects. Although Quiq is not directly related to the networks’ operations, the group filed the request with CADE because it is a business combination of companies in the same sector.

According to Gustavo Schifino, partner and developer of digital platforms at 4All, the company behind the tool, the business plan is to enable restaurants to manage all their orders in one place.

Currently, restaurants often choose one of the apps because they are unable to organize orders placed on different platforms.

“Imagine, for instance, a pizzeria that finds a specific ingredient out of stock. Today, it is not easy to place in all apps that a certain product is unavailable. With Quiq, it will be able to do everything in the same place and in a faster way,” Schifino says.

According to the executive, because of this type of problem many eventually choose to be exclusive to certain platforms. This way, iFood, Rappi and Uber Eats, in particular, tend to have the opportunity to secure higher fees from entrepreneurs.

With Quiq, the fees charged by apps may drop by as much as 20% or 30%, as competition among them will increase, Schifino expects. “Restaurants will be less hostage to one or another app,” he says. “It’s like an opening up of that market.” According to Schifino, all major apps are connected to the platform.

The platform should be launched in late August. The company will be created working with the partners’ 3,000 restaurants, but its goal is to reach 61,000 establishments by 2026. The new company received R$100 (US$20) million from the partners to invest for the next 5 years.

According to Schifino, although the approval request was filed with CADE in December, the platform was being designed even before the pandemic, a period that led to an explosion in the number of delivery orders.

For Sergio Molinari, a food service consultant, the initiative could be positive to reduce the heavy fees charged by apps.

Independent restaurants have to pay about 25% of the value of the order to apps, while larger restaurants manage to pay less than 20%. “It can make a big difference in restaurants’ margins.”

The market is dominated by three major apps: iFood, Uber Eats and Rappi. It is estimated that iFood holds about 70% of this market.