In São Paulo these days you regularly see motorbike drivers carrying large, square bags on their backs. They ride in between the cars and they ignore the red lights, so what’s the big rush? The answer is: Food delivery. In the 1980s, the only time you saw motorbikes doing pizza shop deliveries was around dinner time. Then in 2011, food deliveries under the name “ifood delivery” started up and were a hit among young people. Since 2016, the number of competitors has been increasing, with Uber Eats, Rappi, and so on, and the number of motorbikes has also been increasing.


There are a lot of delivery companies, but let's take a look at ifood delivery, which has been the biggest hit in Latin America.
First, you download the ifood app using your Android or iPhone mobile, or the Windows phone app. The name “ifood” combines the “i” from “internet” with "food." It’s a Brazilian startup launched in 2011. In August 2019, the number of restaurants registered with ifood was 100,000. They say there are as many as 72,000 registered deliverers. To order food, you look through the list of restaurants on the app. While some are little known restaurants, others are restaurants with famous chefs. If you look at the listings by type of meal, you’ll find there is a big variety, including pizzas, pancakes, cafés, bakeries, Chinese food, yakisoba (fried noodles), Mexican food, fish dishes, Japanese food, ice cream, hamburgers, snacks, drinks, and more. You select what you want to eat from a registered restaurant, select a payment method (cash card, credit card, etc.), and specify the delivery address. Then, all you have to do is wait. Delivery rates for ifood are not set and vary from restaurant to restaurant. They also have discount coupons, so you need to check for that.

According to a survey of delivery users, 56% order a delivery every week. The most orders are made for dinner on the weekend, then dinner on a weekday, and lunch on the weekend. Fifty-four percent of users are male, and middle class users order the most.
The other day, I ordered four sweets from a confectionery shop that’s been getting a lot of attention lately. The sweets didn’t come in a stylish box, but a simple, sturdy cardboard box.


The number of delivery users is growing, and it seems ifood recently started trialing deliveries for supermarket shopping.

On a different topic to deliveries, nine years ago in São Paulo, they started publishing a guidebook called "dois por um," about the size of a pocket notebook, for about 70 dollars.


The 2020 edition lists 113 shops in São Paulo and offers everything from breakfast to late night cocktails. The name of this guidebook, "dois por um," means you order two dishes and pay for one. Good for couples, right? Each page features a restaurant guide, and in the corner, they show the courses that are discounted. After eating at the selected restaurant, the corner of the page in the guidebook for that restaurant is cut off, meaning that you have used the discount. It’s perfect for finding out about a restaurant’s atmosphere or to try its food.



Nowadays we can enjoy food from various restaurants using an app, coupons, or guidebooks like this. The way we choose our meals and so on sure seems to be changing, along with the changing times, right?