Beyond the Doorstep: Food Delivery Platforms and the Restructuring of Population Eating Behavior
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65166/fczjr209Keywords:
digital food environment, food delivery platforms, choice architecture, dietary behavior, socioeconomic disparities, platform governance, health-system costsAbstract
Digital food delivery platforms have restructured the food environment through which populations access daily meals, extending its geographic reach while altering the mix of options available within it. This paper develops an integrative conceptual account of how platform business models, algorithmic design, and market-structuring functions transform eating behavior in ways that carry implications for population health and health-system outcomes. Drawing on a synthesis of literature spanning food-environment mapping, platform choice architecture, individual dietary and weight outcomes, socioeconomic and geographic moderation, and health-system cost, the paper proposes a structural-mediation framework in which platform expansion alters food-access conditions, operationalized through structural-access, algorithmic-decision, and commercial-incentive mechanisms that differ in their resistance to correction. The synthesis further identifies socioeconomic position as a moderator that determines the direction, not merely the magnitude, of health effects: the same platform architecture is associated with worsened dietary and weight outcomes among lower-resource populations and improved outcomes among higher-resource populations, a divergence attributed conceptually to differences in the behavior that platform access displaces. Aggregated across a population, these individually divergent effects are linked in emerging quasi-experimental evidence to measurable increases in healthcare-related expenditure, occurring within a regulatory environment that has not yet extended established food-policy instruments to digital platforms. The paper concludes that platform-mediated eating behavior should be understood as a structurally produced, resource-contingent phenomenon rather than a uniformly harmful or beneficial one, with direct implications for population-health targeting, platform-design regulation, and the governance of digital food-access infrastructure. Limitations concerning geographic generalizability and the untested displacement mechanism are identified as priorities for future empirical inquiry.
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