Yesterday I published a cross-platform price comparison: after matching 47,720 menu items across 1,045 DC-area restaurants, DoodDash and UberEats are priced within 0.3% of each other. Price isn’t a differentiator.
But price changes are a different story.
Since January 18th, I’ve been calculating a daily price index across both platforms -- 428,981 menu items from 5,780 restaurants as of today. The Food Delivery Index (FDI) uses the same matched-item methodology that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses for the CPI. The difference: we calculate it daily, not monthly.
Three weeks of data. Here’s what stands out.
The headline: FDI = 100.10. Food delivery menu prices in DC are up 0.10% since the base date. That’s modest. But the average hides everything interesting.
DoorDash is inflating faster. DoorDash’s index sits at 100.15 versus UberEats at 100.08. Same geography, largely overlapping restaurants, but DoorDash menu prices are drifting upward nearly twice as fast. The cross-platform comparison showed pricing parity on levels -- but the rate of change is separating.
Several possible explanations: DoorDash may be allowing or encouraging restaurants to adjust pricing more frequently. UberEats may have more contractual pricing constraints. Or it could be compositional -- the mix of restaurants active on each platform on any given day shifts the average. The gap has been narrowing over the past few days, which makes the compositional explanation more plausible. We’re watching this closely.
Dessert leads all categories at 100.61. That’s a 0.61% increase in three weeks -- an annualized rate of roughly 11%. Cakes, cookies, and ice cream are quietly getting more expensive on delivery platforms. DC local restaurants follow at 100.46, Indian cuisine at 100.41, and breakfast items at 100.37.
Fast food is getting cheaper. The fast food index sits at 99.60, meaning prices have actually declined 0.40% since January 18th. American cuisine is also slightly deflationary at 99.85. The most plausible explanation: fast food chains cycle aggressive promotions on delivery platforms to drive volume, which pushes the matched-item index downward even as other categories drift up.
The category spread tells the real story. The gap between the most inflationary category (Dessert, +0.61%) and the most deflationary (Fast Food, -0.40%) is over a full percentage point -- in three weeks. Food delivery inflation isn’t uniform. It depends entirely on what you eat and where you order.
Why build this?
I co-founded ENAG, Turkey’s independent consumer price index, which has been covered by Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Financial Times. ENAG exists because official inflation data wasn’t trusted. The US doesn’t have that problem with the CPI -- but it does have a measurement gap in the rapidly growing food delivery economy.
Nobody is independently tracking whether your DoorDash order costs more this week than last week. Nobody is measuring which cuisines are inflating fastest, or whether platforms are diverging on price. Now someone is.
The FDI updates daily. The methodology is transparent. The data is public.
See the live index: fdi.zke-solutions.com/
Read the cross-platform analysis: DoorDash vs UberEats
The Food Delivery Index is a project by ZKE Solutions, an independent consulting practice specializing in data infrastructure, price measurement, and quantitative analysis.
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