Food Delivery Market in Serbia Worth EUR 10.8 Million a Month

The Serbian market of food delivery orders through mobile apps is worth around EUR 10.8 million a month, it was said at the online panel dedicated to the rise of the mobile apps for food delivery in the country. The Public Policy Research Center came up with this number based on the data that there are around 356,000 users of food delivery apps in Serbia, that they order food 2.7 times a month on average and that the deliveries are worth around RSD 1,300 on average.

Presenting the other data that the center got by looking into this field, Ljubivoje Radonjic said that fast food which doesn’t require too much time to prepare, like pizzas, burgers and pasta, was ordered the most.

– Our subjects say that, by ordering this kind of food, they want to treat themselves after a hard day’s work or to delight people they live with or their guests – Radonjic said.

He said that food was ordered by women more than men.

When it comes to the impact of the pandemic on this market, he said that it was considerable, as 20% of the subjects said that they first started using delivery apps in March and April 2020, during the state of emergency.

– There’s also a large share of other users, more precisely, 38% of the so-called old users, who used the apps before the pandemic and who said that, during the lockdown, they had more frequently used delivery apps – Radonjic emphasized.

The list of goods which can be ordered through apps is limited, and the secretary of the Association for Electronic Communications and Information Society of the Chamber of Commerce of Serbia (CCIS), Marjan Stojanovic, said that the CCIS had talked about the potential ordering of non-prescription medical drugs.

– Medical devices, such as thermometers, for example, can’t be ordered either – he pointed out.

It was also pointed out that the labor status of the delivery staff was not defined.

Bojan Urdarevic, an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Kragujevac, pointed out that the Serbian labor law neither recognized nor defined this field.

– Our Labor Law is based on the traditional division between dependent and independent labor. The former are legally protected, whereas the latter are not – professor Urdarevic said.

He added that delivery staff and couriers did not belong to either group and that they were instead somewhere in between. Consequently, it would be best to define them as economically-dependent self-employed persons, according to him.

Among the numerous problems faced by the delivery staff is the problem of parking in the city, so penalties for improper parking are calculated into their work in advance.

It was said that the state should find a solution to this problem, and Marjan Stojanovic of the Chamber of Commerce of Serbia said that the CCIS was discussing this problem with the Belgrade city authorities and pointed out that courier delivery was not the same as the morning delivery of food to stores.

Centar za istraživanje javnih politika Beorgad

Privredna komora Srbije

Pravni fakultet Kragujevac

Bojan Urdarević

Marjan Stojanović

Ljubivoje Radonjić

food delivery market

pizzas

burgers

pasta

delivery apps

food delivery staff

Labor Law

problem of parking