The Maze: Southeast Asia's food-delivery fight looks mature, but the ranking still moved. ShopeeFood went from $0.3B in gross merchandise value in 2020 to $3.3B in 2025, passing foodpanda for second place behind Grab. That sounds like a delivery story. It is more useful as a platform story. Meals are frequent, local, subsidizable, and habit-forming. For Shopee, that makes food less like a standalone profit pool and more like a wedge into quick commerce, logistics density, and customer lifetime value.
The 2025 table has one clear winner and one structural question. Grab still dominates Southeast Asia food delivery, rising from $5.9B in 2020 to $12.5B in 2025. ShopeeFood climbed 11x over the same period, from $0.3B to $3.3B, while foodpanda slid from a 2021 peak of $3.4B to $2.5B. The gap matters. ShopeeFood is not close to Grab. But it no longer needs to be close to matter. Passing foodpanda gives Shopee a regional food-delivery beachhead inside the same markets where its ecommerce marketplace already trains customers to search, compare, discount-hunt, and transact.
Food delivery is becoming a customer-acquisition product. Momentum Works' public page frames the 2026 report around platform competition, affordability-driven growth, and the changing role of food delivery in the wider F&B ecosystem. That is the commercial point. Grab can use cheap meals to pull users into GrabMart, dine-out offers, financial services, and ad products. Shopee can attach food delivery to marketplace discounts, wallet habits, and a delivery network that also supports faster commerce. The order is the receipt. The real asset is the repeat customer behind it.
Foodpanda shows what happens when delivery is too narrow. foodpanda's line is almost the inverse of ShopeeFood's: $2.5B in 2020, $3.4B in 2021, then back to $2.5B by 2025. That does not prove operational failure by itself. Market exits, discipline, country mix, and parent-company priorities can all reshape GMV. But it does show the risk of competing in food delivery as a category, while rivals compete through ecosystems. In a market where discounts, restaurants, riders, ads, grocery, payments, and loyalty are connected, a narrower delivery app has fewer places to recover the subsidy.
The report page makes the geography important. Momentum Works says the 2026 edition covers Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, and includes GMV, growth, market share, platform strategy, consolidation, and restaurant implications. That mix matters because Southeast Asia is not one food-delivery market. It is a portfolio of cities, regulations, restaurant densities, delivery economics, and consumer price sensitivities. A platform with ecommerce frequency can cross-subsidize market-by-market. A pure delivery player has to make each local equation work faster.
The 18% growth context keeps the story from becoming a funeral. The public report page says Southeast Asia's food-delivery sector continued to accelerate, with 18% YoY growth in 2025. So this is not category exhaustion. It is category reframing. Growth still exists, but the strategic prize is shifting from "who owns lunch" to "who owns the next transaction after lunch." That is why ShopeeFood's $3.3B matters even beside Grab's $12.5B. It expands Shopee's permission to show up outside the marketplace and use food as a daily habit loop.
Why it matters: Operators should stop reading food delivery as a single vertical. In Southeast Asia, it is becoming local commerce infrastructure. The strongest players are not just selling meals. They are buying frequency, logistics density, restaurant relationships, ad inventory, wallet usage, and quick-commerce permission. ShopeeFood's rise does not dethrone Grab. It does something subtler: it turns delivery into one more surface where a marketplace can make itself harder to ignore.
Sources: Momentum Works report page | LinkedIn source post
