How Restaurant Groups Can Make Delivery More Profitable in Canada

Delivery and takeaway aren't side hustles anymore. For a lot of restaurant groups, they're front and centre and driving weekly volume, reaching guests who might never walk through your door.

But here's the thing: off-premise can look great on paper while quietly eating into your margins. Stack up platform fees, packaging costs, remakes, refunds, and the extra labour that sneaks in between channels, and a busy delivery week can start to feel a lot less exciting.

In Canada, that pressure is real. Toast's Voice of the Canadian Restaurant Industry report paints a pretty clear picture with most operators are feeling the weight of inflation and many are turning to technology to protect their efficiency and stay resilient. Restaurants Canada has also flagged that a significant chunk of restaurants are operating at a loss or barely breaking even. That's the kind of reality that makes every off-premise decision feel like it really matters.

So the question isn't "should we do delivery?" You're probably already doing it. The real question is whether your delivery and takeaway model is built to make money — or just to make orders.

Why off-premise economics feel worse than they used to

Canadian consumer behaviour has moved toward convenience, but it hasn’t moved away from value. In the Toast Consumer Preferences Survey 2025, almost half of consumers say they dine out or order delivery once a week, with a meaningful share doing so two to three times a week or more.

Demand is a good sign, but it doesn't automatically mean profit. If anything, when guests are ordering more often, the cost of getting it wrong goes up too. A late order, a missing item, or a portion of soggy fries isn't just a bad experience. It's a reason not to come back.

And while people are ordering more, they're still watching what they spend. In the same survey, price came out as the single biggest factor shaping how guests decide where to order from (ahead of convenience, ahead of menu variety). That's worth sitting with.

For operators, the squeeze is made worse by cost volatility and a higher baseline for menu prices. Statistics Canada has reported sharp year-over-year increases in restaurant prices in recent periods, which reinforces how visible pricing has become for guests. When price is salient, your off-premise offering has to feel intentionally designed as well as convenient.

It's why so many teams feel like they're working harder but not getting further ahead. The orders are coming in, but the model underneath is fragile. One bad dispatch window, one messy handoff, one promotion that went a little too deep on the discount — and just like that, the margin on a whole hour of tickets is gone.

Start with a delivery P&L that tells the truth

If you’re running multiple locations, one of the quickest ways to improve off-premise profitability is to stop guessing where the money is going and start seeing it clearly. Most groups track sales by channel. Fewer build a proper channel P&L that captures the costs that actually move with delivery and takeaway.

The margin gap usually shows up in four places.

Start with fees and commissions. They’re the obvious culprit, so they tend to take most of the heat. But the real question isn’t just what percentage you’re paying. It’s whether your menu can carry it. If you don’t know which dishes still make sense after fees, you can end up promoting the most fiddly, lowest-margin items at the busiest moments. That’s when the kitchen feels stretched and the numbers don’t add up.

Then there’s packaging. It often gets lumped in as a standard cost, but it behaves more like part of the recipe. The right container keeps food in good shape and reduces complaints. The wrong one, or using top-tier packaging for every item, slowly chips away at profit. The smarter approach is to match the packaging to the dish and how far it’s travelling.

Labour is less obvious, but it adds up. It’s not about dramatic overtime. It’s the extra few minutes to bag properly, double-check modifiers, stage orders neatly, and manage a busy pickup area. On one shift, it feels fine. Across hundreds of orders a week, those minutes turn into real payroll hours. As delivery grows, those small tasks become part of your fixed cost base.

And finally, comps and remakes. They rarely appear as one big red flag. They’re scattered through the week. A forgotten sauce. The wrong side. A dish that arrived cold. Each one feels minor at the time. But add in the time spent resolving it, the credit you issue, and the chance that the guest doesn’t order again, and you start to see where the margin really leaks.

When you look at all four together, something useful happens. Off-premise is rarely unprofitable across the board. It’s usually unprofitable in specific combinations of menu items, timing, and workflow. That’s a fixable problem.

Menu engineering for travel, not for the dining room

When it comes to improving delivery margin, menu design is almost always the highest-leverage place to start. Not because you need to slash your menu down to a handful of items — but because off-premise adds a whole new set of physical challenges to your food. Steam, condensation, separation, carry time, how something holds up if a guest reheats it — all of these things determine whether the experience landing at someone's door actually reflects your brand the way you intended.

Many operators are responding by building a menu that travels well by design, then pricing it with the true channel cost in mind. That doesn’t have to mean price hikes across the board. It can mean selecting a delivery-friendly hero set that is easier to execute and easier to protect.

This is also where consumer psychology matters. If guests are choosing based on value, you want to reduce the chance that they feel disappointed the moment they open the bag. The Toast Consumer Preferences Survey 2025 suggests that photos matter to most diners, with a large share saying photos are very or somewhat important.

That signal is useful for off-premise because delivery is a “visual purchase.” Guests can’t smell the room or see the pass. They’re buying from an image, a description, and past experience. If your best delivery items are not the best-presented items online, you’re making margin harder to earn.

A simple way to think about delivery menu design is to focus on dishes you can rely on. The ones that hold their heat, keep their texture, and arrive looking like you meant them to. They’re also easier to check quickly before they leave the kitchen, which means fewer mistakes, fewer refunds, and fewer apologies.

For restaurant groups, consistency usually matters more than creativity. Your delivery guest isn’t comparing the dish to your dining room experience. They’re comparing it to the last time they ordered. A dish that shows up in great shape every time will almost always beat one that’s brilliant on a good day and disappointing on a bad one.

Redesign your handoffs and take pressure off your team

When delivery gets busy, most teams just try to move faster. You call out times more loudly. You double up on tasks. You push through the rush. It works for a while, but it’s exhausting, and it usually leads to mistakes.

A better fix is to make the handoffs simpler so your team doesn’t have to rely on last-minute saves.

The first handoff is from screen to kitchen. If orders are coming in from different platforms, each formatted slightly differently, your cooks end up translating instead of cooking. That’s when modifiers get missed and timing slips. What helps is clarity. One clear view of what was ordered, when it’s due, and where it needs to go. When that’s in place, the rush feels manageable instead of chaotic.

The second handoff is from kitchen to whoever is bagging and checking. This is where small habits make a big difference. Is everything labelled clearly. Are modifiers easy to see. Is there a quick check before the bag is sealed. Saving thirty seconds on cook time doesn’t matter if the order has to be remade. Avoiding the mistake is where the margin is.

The third handoff is pickup. If drivers, delivery couriers, and walk-in guests are all standing in the same tight area, things get messy fast. People interrupt. Bags get taken too early. Orders sit longer than they should. A calmer, clearer pickup setup often does more for accuracy than asking the team to “be more careful.” Less congestion means fewer mistakes, and fewer mistakes mean fewer refunds.

Fees are real, but the bigger problem is often the wrong channel mix

Most operators can name the fee problem in one sentence. The harder part is designing a channel mix that still makes sense after fees, refunds, and labour.

A useful way to frame it is to separate demand generation from demand capture. Some channels are great at putting you in front of new guests. Others are better at letting you serve your existing guests profitably. The operators who improve margins tend to be deliberate about which occasions they accept at which cost.

Treat every order the same and you'll end up with your efficient orders quietly subsidising your expensive ones. But when you start thinking about orders as different occasions, you can price, package, and execute them differently too. A Friday night family bundle has completely different economics to a single-item lunch order with heavy packaging needs. A downtown delivery carries different risks to a suburban pickup.

The goal isn't to walk away from high-fee orders overnight. It's to reduce your dependency on them over time by building a more balanced model, where repeat guests have a genuine reason to order in the way that works best for your margin.

Tighten the experience where guests notice value most

When guests are value-sensitive, they don’t judge value only by price. They judge it by clarity, fairness, and whether the experience feels smooth.

In the Toast Consumer Preferences Survey 2025 on pricing and value, most diners say price meaningfully influences their restaurant choice, with a large share calling it the primary or quite influential factor.

That doesn't mean racing to the bottom on price. It means being really clear about what guests are paying for and why.

When it comes to off-premise, value perception usually comes down to three small moments.

The first is transparency at checkout. Guests react badly when fees and surcharges feel hidden or catch them off guard. Even when those fees are outside your control, clear communication goes a long way in reducing frustration.

The second is order accuracy. One missing item can make the whole order feel like poor value, even if everything else was spot on.

The third is the end-to-end timing promise. Being fast matters less than being predictable. A realistic prep time that you consistently hit builds far more trust than an ambitious quote you regularly miss.

Get those three things right and you reduce refunds and bring guests back more often. That's a margin win, not just a marketing one.

A grounded way to move forward

The most encouraging signal in Canada right now is that operators are not treating off-premise as a side project anymore. Toast’s Canadian industry research suggests off-premise importance is rising, and many teams are prioritizing operational discipline and the right digital infrastructure to keep margins intact. 

If delivery isn’t making money right now, that doesn’t automatically mean the channel is flawed. More often, it means the structure behind it hasn’t caught up. When you look properly at the numbers, adjust the menu for travel, tighten the handoffs, and make clearer decisions about where orders come from, delivery starts to feel manageable instead of chaotic.

And in a market where guests are watching their spending and costs still move around more than anyone would like, that’s what resilience really looks like. Fewer avoidable mistakes. Fewer refunds. More consistency. A system that supports your team instead of stretching them thin, and a delivery experience that gives guests a reason to order again.