The demand is not the problem. Canadians eat out roughly 23 million times a day, and foodservice is about 3.9% of GDP — around $125 billion a year. What has changed is what is left at the end.
Restaurants Canada expects the country to close about 4,000 more restaurants than it opens in 2026. Most operators report profitability going backwards and guest counts falling with it. In that setting, a delivery commission is no longer a marketing cost you absorb. It is a material share of a margin that has stopped forgiving anything.
What the platforms take
Published commissions across Uber Eats, DoorDash and SkipTheDishes run roughly 15% to 30% depending on tier, with the lower end generally reserved for venues handling their own delivery. Uber Eats raised its marketplace fees in March 2026, its first increase in about a decade. The direction of travel is not downward.
Rates are negotiated per venue and vary with volume, so no single published number is your number. What is reliable is the shape: the headline rate understates the effective one, because the service fee, payment processing and any promotional co-funding sit on top.
The arithmetic
A $40 order at 25% leaves $30. On a 65% gross margin, that order produced about $26 of gross profit before the platform was paid, and about $16 after. A venue doing $25,000 a month through the platforms at that rate hands over $6,250 monthly — $75,000 a year.
In a year when half of Canadian operators report lower sales, $75,000 is not a rounding error. It is roughly what it costs to keep somebody on staff.
The orders you were never buying
Commission buys reach. That is a real service and it is worth paying for when it introduces the venue to somebody new. The question worth asking is narrower: what proportion of last month's platform orders came from a guest who had ordered before?
Those orders were not acquired by the platform. They were placed by someone who already knew the restaurant and used the app because it was the app they had. You paid full freight for a customer you already had, and you still did not get their name, their history, or any way to reach them next month.
What a direct channel actually changes
Two things. The margin on a repeat order stops being shared. And the order arrives attached to a person — visit history, frequency, what they order — which is what makes it possible to notice a regular going quiet and do something about it before they are gone.
Neither of those requires abandoning delivery. They require having somewhere else for the orders that never needed a marketplace to happen.