Pizza delivery...by motorcycle?
May 7, 2017 3:19 PM   Subscribe

So i just got into a totally heated and entirely data-less argument with my spouse wherein I spouted off the made-up statistic that more pizzas in the world are delivered by motorcycle than by car.

I based this entirely on my sense as a child growing up in Asia and Europe that most things are done by motorbike/motorcycle rather than car in the rest of the world but now I find that a casual google does not reveal data on this topic! Also, on more sober reflection I also take into my calculations that pizza as a takeaway product is very much less popular in the rest of the world, so I may be entirely incorrect. Can anyone help me win or lose?
posted by eglenner to Society & Culture (32 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
In order to work it out, you probably need to look at statistics showing where people order their pizza and then work out how they deliver.

Domino's is pretty popular here in Australia and I think they use mostly use scooters and electric bikes.

Would those count as "motorbikes" or are you going to lose on a technicality?
posted by kinddieserzeit at 3:58 PM on May 7, 2017


In SF I see cars much more often than motorcycles, but it happens. I think most of the two-wheeled delivery is for waiters on wheels type places.
posted by rhizome at 4:07 PM on May 7, 2017


Best answer: Anecdata here - I just got back from Shanghai (population >24 million). It's astonishingly expensive to register a car there compared to the US, to the point where it seems like a car would not viable for that kind of work.

In 12 days there I never saw a car marked up as a pizza delivery vehicle, but I saw innumerable scooters with pizza thermal bags strapped to the back (as well as everything else imaginable - I saw a scooter go by with half a pig bungied to the back seat).

I've got no numbers for you, but I feel pretty confident you're right on this point.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 5:24 PM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


In New York, pizzas are typically delivered by bicycle.
posted by actionstations at 5:45 PM on May 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


I have no stats, but as a betting man, I would bet that pretty much any food delivery would be more frequent on a two wheeled vehicle than 4 wheels. In all the larger cities around the world, it is so much easier to get around, park and maneuver a two wheeled vehicle than finding a car parking spot. I hope you bet a pizza on the outcome.
posted by AugustWest at 5:59 PM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I feel like I'm interviewing for a job in the valley, but here we go. Here's one white cishet tech worker's attempt to answer the question:

This random Business Insider article has some (completely unsourced) numbers for pizza consumption per capita by the top 11 countries. Multiplied by population (I'm assuming this is adjusted for relative purchasing power), we get the following total pizza consumption per country:

USA: $43.2bn
Canada: $4.34bn
Spain: $4.07bn
UK: $4.45bn
ANZ: $1.88bn
France: $3.65bn
Germany: $4.24bn
Nederlands: $0.824bn
Belgium: $0.455bn
South Korea: $1.66bn
Japan: $1.64bn

According to this page the average VPN pizza (read: fancy, wood-fired, etc) cost $13. I can't find average delivery order prices, so let's use "fancy in a restaurant" as a rough proxy for "easy at home", since delivery pizza isn't cheap. We'll also assume that 1/3rd of pizzas purchased are ordered for delivery (a totally made-up number). That gets us to the number of pizzas delivered:

USA: 1bn
Canada: 110mm
Spain: 103mm
UK: 112mm
ANZ: 47mm
France: 92mm
Germany: 107mm
Nederlands: 20mm
Belgium: 11mm
South Korea: 42mm
Japan: 41mm

Using household vehicle ownership likelihood as a proxy for the likelihood that a pizza would be delivered by car vs motorcycle (presumably, motorcycles would be overrepresented in urban areas but underrepresented in rural areas?), I've built the following table of proportional likelihoods of motorcycle ownership:

USA: 15.91%
Canada: 15.91% (no data, assumed US numbers)
Spain: 21.52%
UK: 9.46%
ANZ: 15.91% (no data, assumed US numbers)
France: 14.46%
Germany: 18.82%
Nederlands: 18.82% (no data, assumed Germany numbers)
Belgium: 18.82% (no data, assumed Germany numbers)
South Korea: 10.84%
Japan: 25.93%

Multiplying those numbers by the raw pizza numbers above, we get the following numbers of pizzas by delivery type:

Motorcycle: 287mm
Car: 1.49bn

Based on this careful analysis, I have concluded that you are wrong and your wife is right.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 6:17 PM on May 7, 2017 [42 favorites]


Addenda:

I'm going to make the assumption that, based on how low pizza consumption per capita is in Japan, and that's #11 in the list, the ROW pizza consumption is negligible for the purposes of our analysis, but one could probably find some global numbers and back into a ROW number.

I have no idea how recent this data is. Population numbers are "population of (x)" from Wolfram Alpha.

I used the USA numbers for %age motorcycle ownership since the USA and Australia/NZ feel similar to me in terms of their vehicular culture.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 6:21 PM on May 7, 2017


You have to account for the density of pizza businesses. In NYC where there's a pizza place every few blocks (e.g.) bicycles make total sense. In BFE, delivery is likelier to involve a car, moreso if weather is involved.
posted by rhizome at 6:54 PM on May 7, 2017


FWIW, I think it's likely that more food deliveries in general are done by motorbike/scooter than by car, but Fuck It Let's Just Order Pizza is a largely (Anglo-)American phenomenon.
posted by theodolite at 7:53 PM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


I delivered pizza at a rural (US) Dominos for several years, and one day I was looking through the equipment catalog and saw a scooter/motorcycle pizza carrier box listed, so I asked about it and was told that corporate policy forbid 2-wheeled delivery outside of college campus stores. I suspect it was insurance-related (though, in our franchise at least, we drivers were expected to carry our own above-the-minimums insurance) and I suspect most national chains are similar. So I'm afraid unless the international market makes up for it, and from the stats above on per capita pizza consuption I doubt it, I'm afraid you're probably going to lose this argument.

And I was sad and disappointed because from the minute I saw that box I wanted to deliver by motorbike. *sigh*
posted by MoTLD at 8:00 PM on May 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Best answer: As much as I love TheNewWazoo's logic, there a couple potential flaws.

1. In very large cities, the number of delivery people who use bikes vs cars is not necessarily reflective of the overall proportion in the population as a whole. For example, when I lived in Cairo, motorbikes made up a relatively small proportion of the vehicles on the road but I never met a delivery guy that didn't drive one. Cars made no sense for restaurant delivery (pizza or otherwise) since they were liable to get stuck in traffic.

2. The second faulty assumption is that delivery is a static percent. Again, based on my experiences living overseas, there is a significant variance in how often delivery is the mechanism of choice. The larger and more chaotic the city (and therefore the greater the likelihood that delivery would be by motorbike), the more likely it is that food will be delivered. Again using the Cairo example above, even Starbucks delivers, and while they might not be huge consumers of pizza, Dominos, Papa John's and Pizza Hut are just 3 examples of franchises that are located their and I would reckon at least 80% of their sales involve delivery by motorbike.

Given the prevalence of motorbike delivery in most of the world outside of North America, I think you're probably right.
posted by scrute at 8:19 PM on May 7, 2017 [10 favorites]


A car can deliver more pizzas than a motorcycle can. Even if the motorcycle is a Honda Goldwing and the car is a Smart Car, the car is delivering more pizzas.

So, even if we split the number of pizza-delivering cars vs. pizza-delivering motorcycles evenly, cars deliver more pizza.

Consider this: most pizza delivery drivers are young folk working their first job. The cultural meme (at least, in the countries where the most delivered pizza is eaten) is a "first car", not a "first motorcycle" (though I accept many people get a "first motorcycle", it's just that more people get a "first car").

Thus, we can see that most pizza delivery drivers are young people in their first car. Even if the car is not their own first car, one rarely borrows one's father's or mother's motorcycle to do their first job: one borrows the family car.

The only exception to this rule I can think of is Italy, womb of the pizza, who have the world's most pizzas. In Italy the only legal form of transport is Vespa. Even with their lightweight, topping-less, doll-sized appetiser pizzas, you are still only going to fit three or four on the Vespa before it (the Vespa) becomes dangerously unbalanced. A flatbread-laden Vespa lacks the torque necessary to climb Italy's notoriously steep stradas and viales. Also in Italy, nobody gets pizza delivered, because you just go downstairs.

India has the world's most motorcycles, but also the world's least pizzas. Since the question was not "how many motorcycles are there?", we can safely skip over India.

This analysis concludes.
posted by turbid dahlia at 10:51 PM on May 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


In here (Portugal) I think only caterers deliver by car. The closest Pizza Hut at peak hours often has a handful of delivery bikes waiting for service.

I used to know people that bought a delivery bike from someone who was quitting, or got a low-powered bike or used scooter for something like €300 just for that, and started making deliveries in the free time to make some money. Gas is expensive here, I'm not sure if there's any money left delivering with a car.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:06 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Pizza delivery is very popular in Seoul, and it's invariably delivered on scooter/moped.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 1:35 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Here in Belgium, pizza is (1) very popular and (2) invariably delivered by scooter. Moreover, this goes for most of (Western) Europe. I doubt that there is a correlation between household vehicle ownership on the one hand, and the mode of delivery of 'fast food' like pizza on the other. Even though scooters are hardly as popular here as they are in Italy, for example, all the pizza deliverers use them.
posted by Desertshore at 1:44 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I can confirm that in the Netherlands, having pizza delivered is quite common, and the pizza almost always arrives by scooter. A car can carry more at a time, but in the city, a scooter is often faster. It can be parked anywhere. It's also way cheaper to run, especially in countries where fuel is expensive.
And most orders of pizza are 5 pizzas or less, and one scooter can easily carry them.

Also, young people in Europe are plenty likely to get a scooter before they get a car. Young people can't afford the taxes and the fuel costs that come with using a car.

I, too, do not think that there is a strong link between the number of motorcycles (including mopeds and scooters? Unsure) per household and number of deliveries happening on two wheels. In most of the world, there are strong reasons to not use cars for deliveries.

In conclusion, pizza delivery is a land of contrasts. But I would go along with your side of the bet.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:23 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Seems to me it's mainly a question of how much delivery pizza is consumed in the US vs. the rest of the world. If the US accounts for at least 50% of the world consumption, cars almost certainly deliver more pizza. The lower the US percentage, the more likely it is that it goes the other way.

One confounding factor is that it is reasonably common in the US for particular stores to have one or more standing weekly orders with schools or businesses that make up 10-25% of their weekly sales in terms of units (but not revenue, since they are typically sold at a steep discount). These orders are large enough that they would be literally impossible to deliver with anything but a car, truck, or van and make up a decent chunk of the total pizzas delivered.

Bicycle or motorbike pizza delivery just isn't common in the US, even in most major cities. A few stores do it, but not many.
posted by wierdo at 2:31 AM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


Consider this: most pizza delivery drivers are young folk working their first job. The cultural meme (at least, in the countries where the most delivered pizza is eaten) is a "first car", not a "first motorcycle" (though I accept many people get a "first motorcycle", it's just that more people get a "first car").

Another related factor here is that in many counties, people can acquire motorcycle licences a few years before they can get car licences - and much less expensively. This means that pizza joints can scoop up young people on a lower minimum wage to do their deliveries (although they probably do pay rather more for insurance).

I suspect that it is the relative lack of fondness for pizza in countries such as Thailand, China and India that might serve to keep the cars ahead of the bikes however.

(Finally, and just for fun - I drew a pie/pizza chart from the world consumption chart that TheNewWazoo linked to above. I like that the USA has helped itself to a slice comprising 2/3 of the total. Poor old Italy is not going to be pleased when she arrives late to the party).
posted by rongorongo at 3:13 AM on May 8, 2017


Another related factor here is that in many counties, people can acquire motorcycle licences a few years before they can get car licences - and much less expensively.

And/or there are scooters and mopeds in special light categories that do not require a license.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:03 AM on May 8, 2017


More anecdata, Greece: I've never seen food delivery by anything but motorbike/scooter; many pizza places here.
posted by taz at 5:03 AM on May 8, 2017


More anecdata: In Paris, food delivery, including pizza (Domino's and Speed Rabbit [yes, "Speed Rabbit" in English] are both big chains), is almost all done by scooters. They have big insulated boxes on the back to hold the food on the way. Scooters can, and do, weave through traffic where cars would be stuck.
posted by brianogilvie at 6:47 AM on May 8, 2017


Followup: photo of Domino's delivery scooters in Paris.
posted by brianogilvie at 6:52 AM on May 8, 2017


I have never seen a pizza delivered by motorcycle or scooter in Canada. But then, given our weather the delivery driver would only have a job for half the year if they had to rely on two-wheel transport.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:42 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Seems to me it's mainly a question of how much delivery pizza is consumed in the US vs. the rest of the world. If the US accounts for at least 50% of the world consumption, cars almost certainly deliver more pizza. The lower the US percentage, the more likely it is that it goes the other way.

Yeah, this is the crux of it. The 2015 Pizza Power Report has US pizza sales at USD 38bn and World pizza sales at USD 87bn (that's even without making any estimate at how much of North American pizza sales are in Canada/Mexico). I feel pretty confident in saying that, to within a reasonable approximation, ALL pizza delivery sales in the US are delivered by car and ALL pizza delivery sales in the rest of the world are delivered by motorcycle. Unless the rest of the world orders takeout/dine-in (so non-delivered) pizza more than twice as often as the US, motorbikes win.

I really want a pizza now, y'all.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:39 AM on May 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Well that seems pretty weird since the post above yours claims Canadian pizzas are delivered by cars. Also worth noting that US pizzas are cheap, and Asian (European too?) pizzas are spendy, so going by $$ amount many not = going by pizza numbers.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 10:08 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure what you consider spendy, but here in the Low Lands, prices for a pizza start at 6 euros. Just as a point of reference.
Delivery is generally either 2,50 or free if your order is large enough (usually 10 €).
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:25 AM on May 8, 2017


Then not Yerp. $20+ for a Domino's pie here in Korea, similar in JP. Delivery free tho. (also a point of other reference)
posted by Joseph Gurl at 10:31 AM on May 8, 2017


According to the Pizza Magazine report linked above, total North American sales are just over $47bn, the rest of the world total is $87bn. I'd be willing to accept that if everywhere outside of NA uses 2-wheel delivery, then 2-wheel is probably the dominant delivery method. That is all sales, not just delivery, so I guess it all depends on number delivered vs not.

I am in awe that Pizza Magazine exists.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:57 AM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


When I delivered pizzas, the trade mag (that turned me on to all trade mags, I will literally take anything like this home) that we got was Pizza Today.
posted by rhizome at 5:24 PM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


A car can deliver more pizzas than a motorcycle can. Even if the motorcycle is a Honda Goldwing and the car is a Smart Car, the car is delivering more pizzas.

While this is technically correct (the best kind of correct!), I don't think vehicle size is a real-world limiting factor. I delivered pizza for a couple years, and most frequently for the three or so orders I would take on a given run (as noted above, much more than that per run and your delivery times begin to suffer), they would fit in one bag. Two bags was not a rarity, but three certainly was, that was usually when we were carrying just one big order to a party.

The box you see on the back of delivery scooters would definitely be big enough to have carried 95+% of the runs I made over those couple years. That said, we all of us had cars or trucks.
posted by solotoro at 6:55 PM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


We never delivered more than three addresses in a run so that the last one's wasn't delivered cold.
posted by rhizome at 8:58 PM on May 8, 2017


Best answer: Anecdata: I'm a former GM with Papa John's, and worked in 13 stores for 5 franchises.

Delivery vs carryout percentages vary wildly from store to store. In the not-enormous cities I worked in for my first two franchises, the percentage was anywhere from 40-60% delivery. In the DC area stores, it was more like 70-85% delivery. Very rural stores for my last two franchises, where you'd think there'd be a high delivery percentage, it was more like 25-40% delivery. More people would hit the store on the way home from work.
posted by The Almighty Mommy Goddess at 4:02 AM on May 11, 2017


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