Quick answer: Food delivery is the most expensive way to eat. In 2026, delivery apps add a menu markup of about 15–30% over in-store prices, then stack a delivery fee, a service fee (~10–15%), possible small-order fees, tax on the inflated total, and a tip — pushing a typical order close to double the menu price and roughly 4–8 times the cost of cooking the same meal from scratch. Cooking from raw ingredients is the cheapest option (USDA food-at-home plans imply about $3–5 per dinner per person). Prepared meal prep sits in between: not as cheap as raw ingredients, but far below habitual delivery, and it actually saves the time delivery only pretends to.
You order a $15 burrito. You are tired, it is 7:40 PM, and the alternative is standing in front of an open refrigerator making decisions. Twelve minutes later the confirmation email says $31.42.
Nobody sat down and agreed to pay $31 for a burrito. It just happened, one small charge at a time.
What follows is the honest math on the three ways dinner actually shows up: delivered, cooked from scratch, or prepped ahead. We sell prepared meals, so you should be suspicious of us — which is exactly why we are going to tell you where meal prep loses.
Where the delivery money actually goes
The gap between the menu price and your total is not one fee. It is five, stacked.
- Menu markup. Restaurants commonly list prices 15–30% higher on delivery apps (around 20% on average) to offset the commission the app charges them. This one is invisible — you only catch it if you pull up the restaurant's own menu side by side.
- Delivery fee. Typically around $2–6, and higher during peak hours, bad weather, or when drivers are scarce.
- Service fee. Usually about 10–15% of the subtotal, with a minimum around $3. You cannot waive it.
- Small-order fee. Roughly $2.50 if your order falls under the ~$12–15 threshold — which quietly encourages you to order more food than you wanted.
- Tax, then tip. Tax is calculated on the inflated subtotal, not the real menu price. And the tip is genuinely earned — a real person drove your food across town in their own car.
Run those together and a $15 menu item commonly lands somewhere near $28–32 delivered. Close to double, for the same food, arriving cooler than it left.
The honest comparison
Three ways to eat dinner, laid out fairly:
Delivery. The most expensive by a wide margin — analyses put it at roughly 4–8 times the cost of cooking the same meal from scratch. It also does not save as much time as it feels like it does. You still wait 30–45 minutes, and you still have to decide.
Cooking from raw ingredients. The cheapest option, full stop. USDA food-at-home plans imply somewhere around $3–5 per dinner per person depending on the plan level and household size. The cost is not money — it is shopping, prep, cooking, and the pile of dishes waiting for you afterward.
Prepared meal prep. The middle path. More than raw ingredients, far less than a delivery habit, and it removes the labor that makes scratch cooking hard to sustain on a Tuesday.
We are a meal-prep company and we are not going to pretend prepared meals beat rice-and-chicken-from-scratch on pure dollars. They do not. If your only measure is cost per calorie, buy raw ingredients and cook. Meal prep wins on a different number: cost per hour of your life.
The number nobody adds up
One order is not the problem. The habit is.
Three delivery orders a week at about $30 after fees is roughly $390 a month — about $4,680 a year.
That number never appears anywhere. The app shows you one reasonable-looking order at a time, and each one is easy to justify on the night you place it. The annual total only exists if you go looking for it.
Where SmashMeals fits
We are not talking about the Friday night you actually want wings. We are talking about the Tuesday order you place because you are exhausted and there is nothing ready — the one that was never really about the food.
That is the meal a stocked refrigerator replaces best. Heat-and-eat, macro-labeled, 100% gluten-free from a dedicated gluten-free kitchen. No 20% menu markup, no service fee, no 40-minute wait, and no willpower required at the worst moment of the day.
Current per-meal pricing lives on our menu at order.smashmeals.com — we deliberately do not quote prices in articles, because they change and stale numbers help nobody. Free pickup, $15 home delivery in the Tri-Cities, and $30 flat-rate FedEx Ground shipping for eligible addresses outside our delivery area.
Browse the weekly menu, the high-protein lineup, freezer meals, or workplace meals if you are trying to fix lunch for a whole team.
The real point
This is not a guilt exercise. Some nights delivery is genuinely worth $31 and you should order it without a second thought.
But choosing with real numbers is different from drifting into a $4,680 habit you never agreed to. Once you can see the math, the weeknight default order stops being automatic — and that is the whole win.
"Delivery doesn't save you money and scratch cooking doesn't save you time. Meal prep is the honest middle — and most people's weeknight DoorDash order was never really about the food anyway." — Lew Kizer
Source: USDA Food Plans: Cost of Food Reports
"Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people." — Colossians 3:23 (CSB)