The answer to one of restaurants' most nagging pandemic-era questions is becoming more clear with each passing quarter.
Recent results from online ordering providers DoorDash, Uber Eats and Olo all showed a similar trend: Customers continued to use their services to order food through spring and into summer, even as they also increasingly dined out the old-fashioned way.
"We actually have not seen a material decrease in frequency as it relates to our delivery business," said Uber Eats CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on the company's second quarter earnings call earlier this month. "Orders per eater has stayed very consistent. And people are going out, which is great."
The company's delivery gross bookings hit $12.9 billion for the quarter, an increase of more than 85% year over year.
Meanwhile, DoorDash's growth paralleled restaurants' rebound as the pandemic eased. Overall restaurant industry sales for the second quarter were at a record high, surpassing $200 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, as more people got vaccinated and went out to eat again. But that dynamic didn't appear to steal much of DoorDash's thunder. The gross value of orders placed through its marketplace also reached a record high in Q2, of $10.5 billion, an increase of 70% year over year.
That suggests that people were using both online and in-person channels to dine.
"We believe the simultaneous return of in-store dining with ongoing growth in consumer demand for delivery highlights a simple dynamic: Delivery allows restaurants to address more consumer use cases," DoorDash CEO Tony Xu wrote in a letter to shareholders.
And it was not just delivery that continued a strong showing for the quarter. As Olo CEO Noah Glass likes to point out, delivery remains a relatively small slice of overall restaurant sales.
Citing data from researcher NPD, Glass said that digital transactions accounted for 17% of restaurant sales in the quarter, virtually flat compared to the previous period. Delivery made up 6% of that; takeout 10%; and on-premise digital orders, 1%.
"We're seeing those behaviors by consumers and also, of course, by operators offering those new modes of ordering," he said during a call with investors this week. "And that's part of what gives us the conviction that digital is durable across industry segments."
The results come with a caveat: They reflect the period of late spring and early summer, when there was a strong sense that the worst of the pandemic was behind us in the U.S. Those feelings have faded with the rise of the delta variant, and it's unclear what effect that will have on Americans' dining habits.
When asked about whether Olo had noticed an impact, CFO Peter Benevides reiterated that "digital ordering has proved durable," and that the company is continuing to monitor the situation.
"There continues to be a meaningful level of uncertainty given the varying levels of vaccination rates around the country and the impact of existing and potential variants," Benevides said.
Uber reported that new shutdowns in places like Australia led to "significant changes" in business patterns, with its ride-share segment taking a hit while delivery saw a boost. But in the U.S., where there has not been a return to the type of shutdowns that happened earlier in the pandemic, the impact of new variants has been less evident, Khosrowshahi said.
"It's really hard to tell," he said. "People still want to go out, and there may be slight changes in behavior, but there are no material changes in behavior and kind of the underlying growth that we see in the business takes over. So certainly, the July trends that we saw relative to June were pretty encouraging.
"But no one can predict what's going to happen with delta going forward."