Why Careem Food, Deliveroo, and Zomato Are Taking 30% of Every Order, And Four Ways to Take It Back

For every AED 100 a customer pays on Careem Food, Deliveroo, or Zomato, the restaurant on the other end of that order receives somewhere between AED 68 and AED 75. That's before packaging costs, before food cost, before the kitchen staff who prepared it. By the time everything is accounted for, the net return on a delivery order in Dubai can be as low as AED 10-15. The platforms know these numbers. Most restaurant owners don't.

The UAE food delivery market is one of the most competitive in the world. Dubai alone has over 12,000 registered food and beverage outlets, and the share of revenue flowing through third-party platforms has grown from around 18% in 2019 to an estimated 35-40% in 2025 for urban restaurant operators. That growth has been largely driven by consumer habit, platform marketing investment, and the convenience infrastructure that no single restaurant could build alone.

But the economics have never been more uncomfortable. And the restaurants that figure out how to use platforms strategically, rather than being entirely dependent on them, are the ones building sustainable businesses in this market.

The Commission Maths That Restaurants Rarely Do Out Loud

Platform commission structures in the UAE are not publicly disclosed in granular detail, but through operator interviews and publicly available documentation, the following ranges reflect current market reality in 2025:

Careem Food typically operates on a commission model of 25-30% of the order value, with the higher end applying to restaurants on standard (non-negotiated) contracts. Deliveroo charges in the 22-28% range, with variance based on whether the restaurant uses Deliveroo's packaging and whether they're on an exclusive arrangement. Zomato has historically been the most aggressive on pricing, running 18-28% depending on the city and tier, Dubai restaurants tend to be at the upper end given the platform's market share ambitions in the emirate. Talabat, the region's largest platform by order volume, works on a similar 20-28% structure.

These numbers don't include VAT implications, payment processing fees (typically 1.5-2%), or the cost of complying with each platform's packaging and labelling standards. Add those in and effective commissions can reach 32-35% of the gross order value.

Source: Operator interviews conducted by Percee Digital, January, February 2025. Platform documentation and rate card disclosures where available. Rates vary by contract tier, exclusivity agreements, and marketing participation. Euromonitor International, Food Delivery Services, Middle East & Africa Outlook, 2024.

The Unit Economics Nobody Talks About

Let's do the maths on a single AED 100 delivery order. This is not a hypothetical exercise, it's a reconstruction based on operator data from restaurants we work with across Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Starting point: AED 100. The customer pays AED 100 for their order. The platform takes 28% commission. The restaurant receives AED 72.

Packaging: AED 4. Delivery orders require containers, bags, stickers, and often platform-specific labelling. On an average delivery order, packaging costs run AED 3-6. Call it AED 4. You're now at AED 68.

Food cost at 35%: AED 35. A food cost ratio of 35% is typical for mid-market restaurants in Dubai. Some cuisines run higher (steakhouses at 38-42%), some lower (pasta and rice dishes at 28-32%). For this worked example, AED 35 goes to ingredients. You're at AED 33.

Direct labour: AED 8. A delivery order requires preparation time. On a busy shift this might be shared across many orders, but on a slow afternoon a single order might consume 15 minutes of chef time. Averaged across service periods, allocating AED 7-10 per delivery order for direct labour is realistic. At AED 8, you're at AED 25.

Overhead allocation: AED 10. This is where it gets uncomfortable. Rent, utilities, licensing, insurance, equipment maintenance, and management time all need to be allocated across every order. For a 60-cover restaurant in JLT or Downtown Dubai paying AED 350,000-600,000 per year in rent alone, the per-order overhead allocation can easily reach AED 10-15. We'll use AED 10, the optimistic end. You're now at AED 15.

That's 15% net margin on paper, before accounting for staff turnover costs, marketing to keep your platform ranking competitive, or any equipment replacement. In months where platforms run mandatory discount campaigns (which they periodically require participation in), that 15% can go negative.

The cruel irony is that delivery volume can actually destroy a restaurant's finances while making the monthly revenue number look healthy. A restaurant doing AED 300,000/month in delivery revenue might be netting AED 30,000-45,000 before any extraordinary costs. The same revenue through a direct channel with even a basic WhatsApp ordering setup could net AED 75,000-90,000.

Why Restaurants Stay Despite the Margins

The obvious question is: why don't restaurants simply leave the platforms? The answer is more complicated than it appears, and understanding it is the prerequisite for building any effective strategy.

Discovery is genuinely powerful. Between 60-70% of first-time customers find a restaurant through a delivery platform before they ever search for it directly on Google. Platforms invest heavily in app marketing, push notifications, and curated collections, "Best Biriyani in Dubai Marina, " "Top Rated Lebanese in JVC", that expose restaurants to audiences they couldn't reach independently. This is real value. McKinsey's 2023 online food delivery research found that in high-penetration markets like the UAE, platform-first discovery remains the dominant customer journey for restaurant consideration, particularly among expatriates who haven't yet formed strong brand loyalties in a new city.

The marketing spend is invisible but real. When Careem Food sends a push notification to 400,000 Dubai users on a Thursday afternoon, the restaurant paying 28% commission is implicitly subsidising that reach. Building equivalent owned-audience reach costs money and time that most independent restaurant operators don't have.

Kitchen utilisation is a legitimate argument. A restaurant with capacity to serve 100 covers at lunch and only drawing 40 walk-ins has empty kitchen bandwidth. Filling that bandwidth with delivery orders, even at thin margins, is better than idle staff. The calculation changes when delivery becomes the primary channel rather than a supplementary one.

The problem isn't that platforms are inherently extractive. The problem is that most restaurants have allowed themselves to become entirely dependent on platforms without building any parallel infrastructure. The platforms, quite rationally, price to whatever the market will bear, and a restaurant with 80% of its revenue locked into one or two platforms has almost no negotiating position.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute, The Future of Food Delivery: A Global Perspective, 2023. UAE-specific discovery data from platform partner programme materials reviewed by Percee Digital, 2024.

Four Ways to Take Back Margin

The table above captures the structural reality: platforms are excellent at discovery and terrible at letting you own the customer relationship. Direct channels are the opposite. Smart operators use both, but deliberately, and they measure the blended unit economics across channels, not just top-line revenue.

Here are four concrete actions that move the needle, in order of implementation speed:

1. Build a direct ordering channel. This does not mean a $50,000 custom app. It means a WhatsApp Business number with a clear menu link, or a lightweight web-based ordering system (tools like Flipdish, Otter, or a simple Square Online store can be live in days). The average setup cost for a functional direct ordering channel in Dubai runs AED 3,000-8,000 as a one-time investment. For a restaurant doing AED 50,000/month in delivery, shifting 25% of those orders to direct in the first 90 days adds roughly AED 12,000-15,000 in net margin recovery. The payback period is measured in weeks, not years. The critical requirement is that ordering must be frictionless. If a customer has to create an account, download an app, or wait for a callback to confirm their order, they will go back to Careem Food. Frictionless means: one link, order placed in under 2 minutes, payment online, confirmation via WhatsApp.

2. Convert platform customers into direct customers. Every platform order that arrives in your kitchen is a conversion opportunity. A printed insert inside the bag, well-designed, not a cheap photocopy, offering 10-15% off their next order when ordering directly can convert 8-12% of recipients over time. This works only if you give them a simple way to act on the offer (a QR code linking to your ordering page, not a phone number to call). The maths are straightforward: acquiring a first-time customer on Careem Food costs you ~28% commission. Retaining them as a direct customer from order two onwards costs you 2-3% in payment fees. The customer acquisition cost for direct conversion via packaging inserts is approximately AED 1-2 per insert produced and distributed. Even accounting for the discount, you're profitable from the second direct order.

3. Negotiate volume tiers. This is the most under-utilised lever in the UAE restaurant market. All major platforms have volume-based commission tiers, and almost none of them advertise this fact. A restaurant generating AED 80,000-100,000/month in orders on a single platform has genuine negotiating leverage, most operators simply never ask. The conversation is not combative. It's factual: "We represent X orders per month on your platform. At the standard rate, our unit economics are marginal. At 22%, we can commit to participating in your seasonal campaigns and maintaining X menu SKUs. What can we structure?" Platform account managers have discretion to reduce rates by 3-6 percentage points for high-volume partners. On AED 100,000/month in GMV, a 4-point commission reduction is AED 4,000/month, AED 48,000/year, for a conversation that takes 30 minutes.

4. Use platforms for acquisition, not retention. This is the strategic reframe that changes everything. Platforms are a customer acquisition channel. Treat them like you'd treat a paid advertising campaign: the goal is to acquire the customer at a manageable cost-per-acquisition, and then convert them to a more profitable channel. The maths flip completely by the fourth order. A customer acquired on Careem Food at 28% commission, converted to direct ordering by order two, is a highly profitable customer by order four, and they carry data you own, meaning you can market to them via WhatsApp for essentially zero cost. Restaurants that treat every platform order as a terminal transaction instead of the start of a customer relationship are permanently trapped in the acquisition loop, paying 28% forever for customers they could be retaining at 3%.

The Mise Approach

The challenge for most restaurant operators is not understanding these strategies conceptually. It's executing them consistently while running a kitchen, managing staff, maintaining quality, and dealing with the hundred daily urgencies that define F&B operations. This is where systems matter more than strategy.

Mise is Percee Digital's restaurant operating system, built specifically for independent and small-chain operators in the UAE and wider GCC market. It sits across your delivery channels and tracks the unit economics that most operators never see in real time: commission spend by platform, direct order penetration rate, the percentage of platform customers who've converted to direct, and the lifetime value differential between platform-acquired and direct customers.

More practically, Mise automates the conversion engine. When a customer orders via Careem Food, Mise triggers the packaging insert workflow with a personalised QR code linked to their order history. When that customer orders direct for the first time, Mise logs the conversion, sends a confirmation via WhatsApp, and enters them into a loyalty cadence that's designed to make direct ordering habitual. When a customer hasn't ordered in 21 days, Mise surfaces them for a win-back message, not a generic blast, but a message timed to their typical ordering day and referencing their usual order.

This is not a technology problem that requires a large tech budget. It's a habit and systems problem. The average UAE restaurant operator spends more time arguing with a platform's support team about a misfired delivery than they spend thinking about their direct ordering conversion rate. Mise makes the important numbers visible and the right habits automatic.

For restaurants doing AED 100,000+ per month in delivery revenue, the combination of direct channel build-out, volume tier negotiation, and systematic conversion typically recovers AED 15,000-25,000/month in margin within the first six months. That number doesn't require any change to menu pricing, kitchen operations, or the customer experience on the platforms themselves. It's purely a function of getting smarter about how the delivery economics work.

References & Further Reading

1. Euromonitor International. Food Delivery Services, Middle East & Africa Outlook 2024. Covers platform market share, GMV growth, and operator margin data across GCC markets.

2. McKinsey Global Institute. The Future of Food Delivery: A Global Perspective, 2023. Customer discovery behaviour, platform dependency rates, and recovery strategies for operators.

3. Dubai Chamber of Commerce. UAE Food & Beverage Sector Report 2024. Regulatory context, outlet registrations, delivery infrastructure investment trends.

4. Restaurant365. Restaurant Benchmarking Report 2024. Food cost ratios, labour cost benchmarks, and net margin data by restaurant category. US-centric but with applicable unit economics logic.

5. Deliverect. The State of Online Ordering in the Middle East 2024. Platform penetration rates, average order values, and consumer ordering frequency data for UAE and KSA.