Thailand’s food delivery app market has entered the new era of sustainable and steady growth. Looking back, the explosive growth from 2019…
Thailand’s Food Delivery Market 2025–2026: The New Phase of Growth
Thailand’s food delivery app market has entered the new era of sustainable and steady growth. Looking back, the explosive growth from 2019 to 2021, driven by pandemic-induced demand, faced a slowdown a bit in 2022 as pandemic relieved, and came to a decline in 2023. With a lot of questions around the future, the industry finally had a rebound in 2024. This is one of the proofs showing resilience and that the market is now a strategic battleground focused on profitability, customer retention, and affordability.
Market Landscape
In 2024, Thailand’s food delivery market reached $4.2 billion, according to independent research by Momentum Works. Grab led the sector with a 46% value share, closely followed by LINE MAN Wongnai at 40%. ShopeeFood accounted for 7%, while foodpanda and Robinhood held 5% and 2%, respectively. These figures align with Momentum Works’ regional analysis, where Grab led the $17.1 billion Southeast Asian food delivery market in 2023, holding a 55% share.
source: MomentumWorks
Comparing 2023 to 2024, Thailand’s market grew from approximately $3.7 billion. Grab’s share declined slightly from 47% to 46%, while LINE MAN Wongnai increased its share from 36% to 40%, signaling intensifying competition. ShopeeFood grew from 6% to 7%, while foodpanda’s share dropped from 8% to 5% before its eventual exit. Robinhood maintained a modest 2–3% share.
Financially, the environment remains competitive. Grab Thailand posted profits in both 2022 and 2023, earning 1.3 billion baht on 15.6 billion baht in revenue last year. In contrast, LINE MAN Wongnai generated higher revenue (18 billion baht) but narrowed its loss to 563 million baht — a significant improvement from previous years.
Thailand now ranks as Southeast Asia’s second-largest food delivery market, representing about 22% of regional gross merchandise value. With foodpanda’s exit, the sector has consolidated into a de facto duopoly: Grab and LINE MAN Wongnai collectively control 86% of the market, while ShopeeFood, leveraging its e-commerce strengths, remains a distant third.
foodpanda’s Exit
foodpanda exited the Thai market in May 2025 after accumulating ฿13 billion in losses. Even though the exit was highly anticipated but the approach was speculative. Turned out, foodpanda exited with a ‘strategic re-direction’ with Robinhood,meaning foodpanda has transferred restaurant partners and customers base to Robinhood. For Robinhood, which previously held only 2% market share, this has created a new opportunity especially in upcountry regions where it once lagged and a leverage to achieve profitability in 2025.
Key Challenges
All platforms must now address several central challenges:
- Profitability Mandate: The era of burning cash for user growth is over. Robinhood’s commitment of reaching profitability by 2025 and LINEMAN’s planned IPO in 2026 intensify the need for profitability and high-expectation financial performance.
- Urban Market Saturation: The decline in 2023 order volumes signals saturation in Bangkok and major cities; relying solely on these markets is no longer viable.
- Tourist Market Volatility: Fluctuating tourist numbers, notably the fewer Chinese visitors, continue to create instability in spending for both restaurants and platforms in Bangkok.
Strategic Battlegrounds
Here are key areas I think each platform needs to achieve to stay relevant in 2025 and beyond. The 4 strategic battlegrounds are:
- Capturing Gen Z: Gen Z drives order frequency and future growth. Winning their loyalty requires more than discounts; platforms must offer personalized recommendations, engaging social features, and innovative loyalty programs.
- Growth Beyond Bangkok: With urban markets hitting limits, expansion hinges on success in secondary cities and provincial areas. Effective onboarding of local restaurants, optimizing logistics, and strategically building up hyper-localized brand awareness in province-level are now essential.
- Enhanced Ecosystems: Building ecosystems is a sustainable way to retain customers. So, you will see small players expanding services and ‘Super-apps’ like Grab and LINEMAN doubling down on service integrations and new use cases such as Grab’s “Group Buy”, “Dine-out” — creating new use cases, LINEMAN’s Wongnai POS — making platforms indispensable to restaurant partners by unifying online and offline operations.
- Affordability: With such a mass market, platforms must maintain affordability. In the new growth era, we will likely not going to see relentless discounts, but through value-focused deals: subscriptions, tiered rewards, and O2O cross-discounts with sophisticated customer segmentation and targeting
2026 Outlook
Thailand’s food delivery market is maturing, with the focus shifting from wild pandemic-era growth to lasting financial sustainability. With Foodpanda gone, Grab and LINEMAN are poised to solidify their lead. Their future success rests not just on growth, but on profitably capturing Gen Z, expanding beyond saturated urban markets, and building value-driven ecosystems that consistently provide reasons for users and partners to keep using the platform.