Amazon extends partnership with Grubhub to let US customers order food delivery inside Amazon's app through Grubhub and makes Grubhub+ a permanent Prime perk
- Any Amazon customer can search for “Grubhub” in the product search bar of Amazon's app to order, track and manage their food, like they would through the Grubhub app.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon first tied Prime to Grubhub through a time-limited membership offer and an equity arrangement in 2022. Making that benefit permanent turns the earlier one-year Grubhub+ offer into a standing component of Prime rather than a promotional experiment.
The move also revisits Amazon's longer food-delivery arc: it previously built restaurant delivery through Prime Now and sought restaurant-ordering reach via its Olo partnership. This time, Amazon is distributing a specialist's service inside its core shopping app rather than foregrounding a separate delivery operation.
First-order effects
- U.S. Amazon app users can discover, place, track, and manage Grubhub orders without switching to Grubhub's app, giving Grubhub another customer entry point.
- Prime members retain Grubhub+ as an ongoing membership benefit, while Amazon adds a food-ordering use case to Prime's bundle.
Second-order effects
- Grubhub gains lower-friction exposure to Amazon's app audience and a more durable Prime acquisition channel; Amazon gains a partner-led way to broaden food-related engagement without reviving its own restaurant-delivery model.
- DoorDash and other delivery platforms face a stronger bundled alternative for Prime households, increasing pressure to differentiate through their own memberships, merchant selection, or in-app convenience.
Third-order effects
- If this model expands, large consumer platforms may increasingly treat food delivery as a bundled engagement layer, with specialist marketplaces supplying fulfillment while the platform owns discovery and the customer interface.
- The arrangement points to a more concentrated contest over subscription benefits and default app placement: delivery services that lack comparable distribution partnerships could face higher customer-acquisition pressure.
The trend: Consumer platforms are shifting from building every adjacent service themselves toward embedding specialist marketplaces inside membership bundles and core apps.