There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with watching a customer who has been to your restaurant three times start ordering through Chowdeck instead. They know your food. They like your food. But somewhere between traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge and the convenience of tapping a screen, the relationship shifted. Now you are paying a commission to be reminded that they exist.
This is the reality for thousands of restaurant owners across Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt right now. Food delivery apps in Nigeria have changed the game, and not entirely in restaurants' favour. That is not to say the apps are the villain in this story. They are not. But the way most restaurants are currently using them is leaving serious money on the table and slowly eroding something more valuable than revenue: the direct relationship with their guests.
Here is what fighting back actually looks like.
Before anything else, restaurant owners need to be clear-eyed about what the commission structure on these platforms actually costs. Chowdeck, Glovo, and similar platforms typically charge restaurants a commission on every order placed through their app. Depending on the arrangement, that figure can sit anywhere between 15 and 30 percent per order.
On a meal that costs ₦8,000, a 25 percent commission means ₦2,000 goes to the platform before you have covered a single ingredient, paid a member of staff, or kept the lights on. At low order volumes, that might feel manageable. Scale it across hundreds of orders a month and it becomes a structural problem, not a minor operational cost.
The platforms know this. Their value proposition is reach, specifically the ability to put your restaurant in front of customers who would never have found you otherwise. That is a legitimate value. The mistake is treating the platform as a substitute for building your own guest base rather than a tool for expanding it.
The most important mindset shift a Nigerian restaurant owner can make is this: food delivery apps are for customer acquisition, not customer retention. They are the equivalent of a billboard on Ozumba Mbadiwe. Useful for getting someone through the door the first time. Not where you want to be spending money to keep a loyal customer coming back.
When a new customer orders from your restaurant through a delivery app, that is a success. They found you, they tried your food, and they liked it enough to finish the meal. The work now is to convert that first-time app customer into a direct customer before the platform starts showing them a competitor the next time they open the app.
This is not as complicated as it sounds. A simple note tucked into every delivery order, whether a branded card or a sticker on the packaging, with your WhatsApp number and a small incentive for ordering directly the next time, can begin that conversion process. It does not need to be a discount. It could be early access to a new menu item, a complimentary small chop on their next direct order, or simply the promise of a faster response time when they book directly.
The platforms own the data. That is the part most restaurant owners do not fully reckon with until it matters. When someone orders jollof rice and grilled chicken from your Lekki restaurant through a delivery app, the platform knows their name, their address, how often they order, and what they spend. You know almost none of that.
This is not an accident. It is the business model. The platform needs that data to retain the customer and serve them relevant options, which may include your restaurant or may include the new place that just launched three streets away.
The only way to build real resilience against this is to create your own channel for guest communication. WhatsApp remains the most effective tool for Nigerian restaurants by a significant margin. A well-managed WhatsApp broadcast list, even one with 200 contacts, allows you to communicate directly with people who have already chosen your restaurant before. You can share new menu items, announce specials, or simply remind people you exist when the Friday hunger hits at 6pm and they are deciding where to order from.
The restaurants growing most consistently on platforms like Dinesurf are not the ones with the biggest delivery app presence. They are the ones that know their guests, communicate with them directly, and create enough of a pull that customers seek them out rather than stumbling across them.
Another area where Nigerian restaurants are losing money quietly is pricing. Many restaurants list the same prices on delivery apps that they charge for dine-in, which means they are effectively subsidising the platform's commission out of their own margin.
There is a smarter approach. Most platforms allow restaurants to set delivery-specific pricing, and many customers already expect to pay a small premium for the convenience of delivery. Adjusting your delivery menu pricing upward by 10 to 15 percent is not dishonest. It is accurate. The cost of getting food to someone's door in Lagos traffic is real, and it is right that the pricing reflects that.
Being transparent about this with your regular customers also builds goodwill. When you communicate that direct orders through WhatsApp or your own booking system are priced lower, you are giving people a genuine reason to shift their behaviour rather than just hoping they will.
Most restaurant owners think about the relationship between delivery and dine-in as a trade-off. Either a customer comes in or they order from home. The smarter frame is to treat delivery as the first step in a longer relationship, one that ideally ends with someone sitting at your table.
Every delivery order is an audition. The food arrives, the customer eats it, and they form an opinion about your restaurant. If the experience is good, that is an opening. A well-placed card in the packaging that reads something like "This tastes even better in the restaurant. Reserve a table this weekend" costs almost nothing to produce and plants a seed that no algorithm can plant for you.
Nigerian diners are inherently social. The experience of eating out, the ambience, the conversation, the occasion, carries weight that a delivery box simply cannot replicate. Restaurants that understand this use their delivery presence as a marketing channel for their physical space rather than treating the two as entirely separate businesses.
You can take this further by creating experiences that are exclusive to dine-in. A weekend brunch menu that is not available on any delivery app. A chef's table evening once a month. A live music night that turns a Thursday into an occasion. These touchpoints give delivery customers a genuine reason to make the trip, and they create the kind of memories that generate word-of-mouth no sponsored placement on a delivery app can buy.
The goal is a loop: the app introduces them to your food, the food earns their trust, and the dine-in experience earns their loyalty.
The delivery apps are built to optimise for speed, price, and volume. If your restaurant is trying to win on those dimensions against a ghost kitchen or a QSR chain with ten locations, you will lose. That is not where an independent or mid-scale Nigerian restaurant has its advantage.
Your advantage is in the things the apps cannot replicate: a specific atmosphere, a chef whose story resonates, food that tastes like it was made for someone rather than packaged for logistics. Leaning into these things, both on and off the delivery platforms, is how you build a brand rather than just a listing.
On your app profile, this means investing in photography that actually represents your food and space, writing a description that sounds like a person rather than a template, and using the review section actively. Responding to reviews, good and bad, signals to both the algorithm and potential customers that there is a real operation behind the listing.
Off the platform, it means giving dine-in customers a reason to keep coming back that no delivery app can offer. An experience, a relationship with the staff, a signature dish they cannot get anywhere else.
Food delivery apps in Nigeria are not going away. Chowdeck alone now operates across eleven cities. Glovo has invested over 37 billion naira in Nigerian infrastructure. New entrants like Swoop are raising significant capital and expanding aggressively. The delivery economy is here, and for restaurant owners, the choice is not whether to participate but how.
The restaurants that will win over the next five years are not the ones that refuse to engage with the apps. They are the ones that engage strategically, use the platforms for what they are genuinely useful for, and quietly build a direct guest relationship that no commission structure can touch.
Your food already has people coming back. The job now is to make sure they are coming back to you, not to an app that happens to stock your menu.
Dinesurf is the Guest Growth OS for hospitality brands across Africa.
We help restaurants, lounges, nightlife venues, and experience-led operators attract the right guests, convert demand into paid bookings, and turn first-time visits into repeat revenue, all from one connected system.
We are not just another restaurant software. We are the commercial growth layer built specifically for African hospitality — priced for this market, backed by a local team, and invested in the growth of the continent's dining culture.
