Just in time for the Superbowl – one of America’s preeminent eating holidays – Chatmeter has released a new report that uncovers consumer sentiments around food delivery. In fact, 36 percent of Americans plan to order food on Sunday, and 37 percent of those plan to spend more than last year.
But the report, entitled 2025 Restaurant Delivery & Reputation, isn’t necessarily glowing about restaurant delivery. In fact, it reveals why most consumers opt instead for pick-up or home cooking – reasons that span fee frustration, delivery delays, incorrect orders, and bad customer service.
Chatmeter built this study using its generative AI platform, Pulse Ai, to ingest and analyze two million+ customer reviews. The goal was to uncover insights about consumer sentiment, and correspondingly inform strategic positioning and improvements for local restaurants, including multi-location brands.
“There are inherent challenges with delivery, but tuning in to customer feedback can help you change your delivery menu, offer better promotions, improve customer service, and shift in-store operations to ensure delivery orders arrive intact,” Chatmeter CEO John Mazur told Localogy Insider. “Multi-location restaurants need to understand consumer feedback at scale, and operationalize that feedback at scale. With AI, restaurants can now achieve true customer intelligence. They really can be everywhere at once.”
Good, Bad & Ugly
Going deeper into the results, we pulled out a few takeaways for Localogy Insider readers. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly…
- 71% of Americans agree having good food for the game is important, and 36% plan to order food delivery for the big game. 37% plan to spend more than in 2024.
- 35% say they will be taking advantage of discounts in delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats.
- Those who do opt for delivery do so because they want to focus on something else besides food preparation (42%), like watching the game or socializing.
- Menu prices are the #1 factor influencing consumers’ restaurant delivery choices, followed by delivery fees.
- More than half of delivery-related reviews were negative (46%) or mixed (6%) in sentiment.
- 55% cited expensive delivery fees as a top reason they sometimes skip a delivery, followed by long estimated wait times (43%), delivery prices being more expensive (39%), and having to tip (20%).
- 50% of consumers have had food arrive cold and/or late, and 44% have had items missing from their order.
- When this happens, 50% say they’ll avoid ordering from that restaurant again.
- Top delivery menu items
Pizza
Wings
Sandwiches/subs
Burgers
Tacos
- Worst delivery menu items
Seafood
Ice cream
Steak
French fries
Chatmeter Applies AI to Make Reputation Monitoring Faster, More Powerful
Indexing & Synthesizing
One of the underlying takeaways from Chatmeter’s report is that data, in the aggregate, can help inform local business strategies, as noted. Improving operations needs to start with putting your finger on what problems need to be fixed. That sounds obvious, but it’s rarely practiced in a data-backed way.
In some ways, this reminds us of infamous operational turnarounds with delivery-centric businesses. And at the top of that list is Domino’s. The company overhauled its logistical systems to fix several issues it was having – everything from quality to freshness to delivery time to pizza sticking to the box.
But what Dominos didn’t have at the time was today’s set of underlying AI tools. For example, AI can be powerful in indexing and synthesizing large data sets to make it easier to parse and draw out insights. That’s what Chatmeter did with its Pulse Ai engine and we expect to see more AI deployments like this.
“The operational insights AI can provide today are truly unprecedented,” said Mazur. “Let’s say a big chunk of your customers are complaining that your tacos are soggy, and your tacos are one of your top-performing menu items. You might be able to dig into that feedback and realize, hey, a lot of these reviews are coming from more suburban and rural stores, where food might be traveling for 20-30 minutes before it’s delivered. That insight can help you upgrade packaging or package food up in a way that the customer assembles it at home for those stores.”
Header image credit: Pixzolo Photography on Unsplash
