How popular is food delivery in China? 17.12 billion orders in the past year

China’s food express orders reached a staggering 171.2 billion by the end of 2020, up 7.5 percent from a year earlier, according to data released by CCTV’s Finance and Economics Channel.

The size of the national food express delivery market reached 835.2 billion yuan, an increase of 14.8% over the same period last year.

It is estimated that there are 500 million users in China’s food courier industry, which means that almost one in three Chinese is a food courier user.

This growth rate is faster than in previous years, which may be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the period when China quarantined every cities to stop the spread of the virus, food delivery became the main way for many people to get lunch and dinner. During that time, food distributors also became one of the important industries to absorb the unemployed.

Food delivery has long been a hot industry in China, and the size of China’s food express market has reached 653.6 billion yuan in 2019.

This is due to China’s advantages in human resources. Although the income of food courier is not high, the job has a significant advantage for rural residents who enter first-tier and second-tier cities for the first time. Unlike Starbucks baristas who require you to have beautiful appearance and complex skills, they only need to be able to drive electric bicycles to be qualified for the job.

And the schedule of this job is more flexible, and the food delivery man can decide how long he works each day.

But it can sometimes cause trouble, and food couriers often violate traffic rules and even get injured in order to meet delivery deadlines, an issue that has sparked controversy this year.

According to the forecast of CCTV, the market penetration of China’s food courier industry in first-tier, second-tier and third-tier cities has reached 96.31%, which means that almost all urban residents have become users of food courier.

In the next 1-3 years, the annual turnover of the food delivery industry is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan (about US $154.76 billion).