Design Food Delivery Service
Last Updated: December 31, 2025
A food delivery service connects hungry customers with nearby restaurants and facilitates the delivery of meals to their doorstep through a network of delivery partners.
Loading simulation...
The platform handles the entire lifecycle: browsing menus, placing orders, processing payments, assigning delivery partners, and providing real-time tracking until the food arrives. It must coordinate three distinct user types (customers, restaurants, delivery partners) while ensuring fast delivery times and a smooth experience for everyone.
Popular Examples: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Swiggy, Zomato, Grubhub
This system design problem touches on many interesting challenges: real-time location tracking, geo-spatial queries for finding nearby entities, coordinating multiple actors with different needs, optimizing competing constraints (fast delivery vs fair partner distribution vs cost), and handling traffic spikes during lunch and dinner rushes.
In this chapter, we will explore the high-level design of a food delivery service.
Lets start by clarifying the requirements: