ShopeeFood began rolling out in the Philippines on September 16, starting with selected users and locations in Metro Manila. For now, it remains a soft launch. Access is limited, restaurant selection is still thin, and Shopee has not said how quickly it will expand.

At first glance, this looks like Shopee entering another category. But food delivery is a difficult business. Restaurants, riders and customers all need to be available in sufficient numbers, while consumers are highly sensitive to fees, discounts and delivery time.

So why would Shopee want in?

The answer may have less to do with food than with frequency.

Most people do not need to buy something from Shopee every day. Food is different. You may buy clothes a few times a year, but you eat several times a day.

That makes food strategically useful even if ShopeeFood never becomes Shopee’s biggest business. It gives Shopee another reason to be opened between shopping occasions.

ShopeeFood also starts with an advantage that a new delivery company would not have. The Shopee app is already on millions of phones. Existing users already have accounts, delivery details and familiarity with ShopeePay, Coins and vouchers. ShopeeFood is also built directly into the main Shopee app rather than requiring a separate download.

Shopee therefore does not need to build a completely new consumer relationship. It needs to convince existing users to do one more thing inside Shopee.

Because access is still limited, our test is not meant to represent average prices across Metro Manila. Instead, we wanted to see how ShopeeFood is competing at launch.

We compared three baskets across ShopeeFood, GrabFood and foodpanda: a ₱95 Pan de Manila order, a ₱174 McDonald’s meal and a roughly ₱2,100 Kenny Rogers group meal. ShopeeFood had the lowest final checkout in all three.

For Pan de Manila, the same 12-piece pandesal pack was listed at ₱95. The final checkout was ₱112.50 on ShopeeFood, ₱160.38 on foodpanda and ₱164 on GrabFood. ShopeeFood was roughly 30% lower than both competitors.

We saw a similar pattern with McDonald’s. The same Chicken McDo meal with fries and a drink was priced at ₱174 across all three platforms. ShopeeFood came to ₱144.20, foodpanda to ₱197.35 and GrabFood to ₱228.

The food itself was not cheaper on ShopeeFood. A 20% food voucher removed ₱34.80, free shipping removed the delivery charge, and a ₱5 service fee remained.

The Kenny Rogers comparison produced a different result. The roughly ₱2,125 group meal came to ₱2,121 on ShopeeFood, ₱2,138 on GrabFood and ₱2,208 on foodpanda.

ShopeeFood was still lowest, but it beat Grab by only ₱17.

That makes sense when you look at how the vouchers work. A ₱50 discount is meaningful on a ₱200 meal but barely moves a ₱2,000 order. Delivery subsidies also matter much more when the food itself is inexpensive.

Based on these three examples, ShopeeFood’s launch advantage appears strongest on smaller orders, where delivery and platform fees normally make up a larger share of the bill.

That may be more important than it sounds. Small orders such as breakfast, snacks and individual meals are also the kinds of transactions that can happen more frequently.

These are launch-week observations, not proof that ShopeeFood will always be cheaper. Branches and delivery distances were not always identical, and promotions may be introductory or targeted. But in all three baskets we documented, ShopeeFood produced the lowest final checkout.

Vietnam provides the strongest example of how large ShopeeFood can become. Its online food-delivery market reached an estimated US$2.1 billion in 2025, according to Momentum Works. ShopeeFood and GrabFood each accounted for roughly 48% of GMV.

There is an important difference, however. ShopeeFood in Vietnam did not start entirely from zero. It grew out of Now, an existing delivery service that was rebranded as ShopeeFood in 2021. That meant Shopee already had merchants, riders and users to build on.

That makes Vietnam useful for showing what ShopeeFood can eventually become, but less useful as a direct template for the Philippines.

Indonesia looks closer to the challenge Shopee faces here. ShopeeFood entered a market with established competitors and steadily gained share.

Momentum Works estimated ShopeeFood at around 18% of Indonesian food-delivery GMV in 2024. By 2025, that had risen to 23%, versus 46% for GrabFood and 31% for GoFood.

ShopeeFood did not need to become No. 1 to matter. It only needed to become large enough that consumers, restaurants and competitors could no longer ignore it.

Before ShopeeFood’s arrival, Philippine food delivery was essentially a two-player market. Momentum Works estimated Grab at 61% of GMV and foodpanda at 39% in 2024. By 2025, Grab’s share was estimated at around 65%.

That gives ShopeeFood a difficult starting point. Grab is already deeply established, foodpanda still has significant merchant and rider coverage, and ShopeeFood currently has much more limited restaurant selection.

But ShopeeFood begins with one major advantage: it already has Shopee.

That may mean it does not have to persuade people to abandon GrabFood or foodpanda completely. It may simply need to become another platform consumers check before they place an order.

Many Filipino delivery users already compare apps depending on which has the better promotion or final price on a given day. ShopeeFood can insert itself directly into that behavior.

Launch vouchers can persuade people to try ShopeeFood, but discounts cannot compensate indefinitely for limited restaurant choice or unreliable delivery.

The harder job is now building enough restaurant and rider coverage to make the service consistently useful. A cheap order may get someone to try ShopeeFood once. A broad restaurant selection, available riders and reliable delivery are what will determine whether they come back.

ShopeeFood has not publicly disclosed a standard Philippine restaurant commission yet, but that number could become important.

In Vietnam, ShopeeFood uses contractual merchant commissions and then offers optional promotional programs that can add a few percentage points to a restaurant’s existing rate in exchange for benefits such as ShopeeFood-funded free-shipping vouchers and added visibility.

If Shopee enters the Philippines with attractive merchant terms while also subsidizing consumers, it could address both sides of the market at once. Consumers get another affordable option, while restaurants get another source of orders.

That may be the clearest path to fixing ShopeeFood’s biggest weakness today: limited selection.

Right now, a ₱174 McDonald’s meal becoming a ₱144.20 checkout is easy to notice and easy to share.

The bigger question is what ShopeeFood looks like after the launch period. Does restaurant selection expand? Are there enough riders during busy periods? Do consumers keep checking ShopeeFood when the introductory discounts become less generous?

Vietnam shows that ShopeeFood can become a major platform once it reaches scale. Indonesia shows that it can gain ground against entrenched competitors.

The Philippines will test something slightly different: whether Shopee’s existing consumer base is enough to give a new food-delivery network a head start.

Shopee has spent years teaching Filipinos to open the orange app when they want to buy something. Now it wants the lunch order too.

Let’s unpack it.