How Do Food Delivery Platforms Affect Urban Logistics?: The Case of Glovo in Barcelona as a Preliminary Study

Abstract

The rise of the platform economy is rapidly changing the traditional economic and business environment. The phenomenon is being widely studied in academia, although so far this has taken a general approach. Lack of precise data and differences in markets hinder more specific analyses that could illustrate the real impact of these trends. This chapter offers an exploratory study of the impact of food-delivery platforms on urban logistics. The study is based on data scraped from the app of the Barcelona-based Glovo, consisting of affiliated restaurants, delivery times, and cost of the delivery. The physical premises identified for the restaurants were georeferenced to study how they are spread and clustered in the city. Restaurants were also matched to their parent companies to obtain economic data from the specialist SABI database. The research questions aim to provide understanding of what types of restaurants have joined the platform, how this has affected their annual turnover, where their physical premises are lo- cated, and how the consumer’s location affects the service.