For years, F&B owners viewed delivery platforms as a necessary evil, a simple transaction channel to reach customers who didn’t want to leave their couches. But in 2025, that relationship has undergone a radical transformation. Platforms are no longer just delivering bags of food; they have become “demand orchestrators” that dictate how, when, and at what price restaurants operate.
The annual Food Delivery Platforms in Southeast Asia report by Momentum Works highlights a significant shift in platform power. Through aggressive expansion of dine-out offerings, product advertising, and sophisticated data sets, platforms like Grab and ShopeeFood are extending their influence deep into the offline F&B ecosystem — a market far larger than the US$22.7 billion food delivery sector itself.
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Dine-out: The high-margin Trojan Horse
The most visible move in this strategy is the rise of “Dine Out” deals. By offering vouchers and discounts for in-store dining, platforms can capture a slice of a restaurant’s total revenue without the high operational costs associated with delivery riders. For the platforms, this is a high-margin touchpoint that deepens user engagement. For the merchant, it creates a dangerous level of dependency.
When a customer uses a Grab Dine Out voucher, the platform isn’t just a courier; it is the entity that brought the customer through the door. This allows the platform to collect data on offline visit patterns, category benchmarks, and pricing dynamics that the merchant themselves cannot see. This creates what the report calls “structural data asymmetry”: the merchant sees only their own performance, while the platform sees the entire market.
The algorithm as the new head chef
This data asymmetry is being weaponised through advertising products. Grab, ShopeeFood, and Line Man are all aggressively pushing “ads products” for F&B chains and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). These range from simple boosted placements for a “Warung” or street vendor to sophisticated, AI-driven keyword targeting for multi-national QSR chains.
The report notes that pricing, promotions, and visibility are increasingly becoming platform-led rather than merchant-led. Through curated discovery feeds and targeted vouchers, platforms effectively choose which price points convert and which restaurants get exposure.
Merchants are forced to “treat platforms as operating environments rather than simple sales channels,” designing their menus and price tiers around platform logic to avoid being buried by the algorithm.
Dark kitchens and the limits of efficiency
Interestingly, the platforms’ attempt to control the supply side through “dark kitchens” has largely stalled in Southeast Asia. Unlike China or the Middle East, where dark kitchens contribute up to 30 per cent of order volume, the model was deployed in Southeast Asia before the ecosystem was ready.
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Without the extreme demand density found in cities like Dubai or Shanghai, centralised production facilities proved economically unviable at scale. Most dark kitchen startups in the region have either shut down or pivoted toward building their own offline brands. This failure suggests that while platforms can orchestrate demand, they cannot yet easily manufacture supply.
The merchant squeeze
As platforms evolve into demand orchestrators, the power dynamic has shifted decisively. Medium-sized merchants are the most vulnerable, finding it increasingly difficult to build brand loyalty that exists independently of the platform’s discovery feed. To survive in 2026 and beyond, the report suggests that restaurants must build “complementary brand touchpoints” outside of the apps to avoid becoming interchangeable commodities in a world ruled by platform mechanics.
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