iiMedia Research: China's food delivery market reached $208B in 2023, 2.3x the size in 2020; Meituan and Ele.me employ over 10M gig workers combined
Meituan, Ele.me employ a combined 10m, but conditions remain harsh for gig employees — Meituan delivery drivers can be seen buzzing around Guangzhou's office areas on weekdays.
Context & Ripple Effects
China's delivery platforms were already competing for capacity: Meituan's planned hiring push to counter ByteDance's delivery expansion showed that rider supply was part of the competitive fight. This market snapshot puts that competition in labor-market terms, with Meituan and Ele.me jointly responsible for a very large gig workforce.
The scale of the market makes reported harsh rider conditions more than a localized employment issue. Later coverage of planned social-security benefits for riders suggests worker protections were becoming an increasingly consequential operating question for the sector.
First-order effects
- Meituan and Ele.me must manage the service quality, retention, and safety implications of a combined workforce exceeding 10 million riders while conditions remain under scrutiny.
- Riders gain visibility as a core input to a large consumer-service market, rather than a peripheral contractor pool.
Second-order effects
- Competition for delivery coverage can raise pressure on platforms to improve rider terms or benefits, particularly when hiring and retention affect order fulfillment.
- Any added labor protections or benefits would increase the importance of operational efficiency for platforms that have historically competed on delivery scale and speed.
Third-order effects
- If rider protections become an industry baseline, China's delivery market could shift from a model centered chiefly on flexible labor scale toward one where employment-related obligations are a durable cost of competing.
- The sector's long-run economics will increasingly depend on whether platform growth can absorb stronger worker protections without reducing service coverage or raising consumer prices.
The trend: China's maturing platform-delivery market is turning gig-worker conditions and benefits into a strategic constraint alongside demand growth and competitive expansion.