A third of orders now come through delivery apps and I cannot tell if they are making me money — how do you work it out?

Get the number per order rather than per month, because the monthly figure hides the thing that decides this.

For a representative delivery order, write down: menu price, minus commission, minus the packaging, minus card and platform fees, minus the food cost. What is left is your contribution from that order. Do the same for the equivalent order over the counter.

What people find when they do this honestly:

Some items survive and some do not. High-margin, cheap-to-make items still contribute after commission. Low-margin items — anything where food cost is already a large share — often contribute almost nothing or go negative once packaging is counted. Averaging across the menu hides this completely, which is why the monthly view feels ambiguous.

Packaging is bigger than expected. It is a per-order cost that does not exist over the counter, and for drinks and anything requiring insulated or leak-proof containers it is not small.

Labour per order is higher, because delivery orders arrive in bursts and cannot be batched the way a queue can.

The useful action from this is usually not leave or stay. It is change what you sell on the platform. Take off the items that lose money, put on the ones that work, and price the platform menu to cover the commission. Most people are running their counter menu at counter prices through a channel that takes a large cut, and that is the actual problem.

On your real question — additional business or the same customers paying you less — there is a way to get evidence rather than a feeling.

Look at total covers, not channel mix. Pull your counter transactions from before the platforms and compare with now. If total orders grew by roughly what delivery added, it is incremental. If total orders are flat and the split changed, you are substituting, and paying commission for the privilege.

Look at the times. Delivery orders concentrated in the evening or in bad weather, when your counter is quiet, are much more likely to be genuinely additional. Delivery orders at your busiest lunch hour are very often people who would have walked in, and they are also the ones costing you the most in kitchen chaos.

Look at the postcodes. Orders from outside your walking catchment are new customers. Orders from the street outside are not.

That third one is the quickest and it is usually the most striking. If a meaningful share of delivery orders come from within a few minutes walk, you are paying a platform to serve people who were already yours.

And the honest thing about substitution: it is not fully reversible. Once a customer has the habit, leaving the platform loses some of them permanently rather than converting them back. Which is an argument for acting sooner rather than later if the numbers say what you suspect.