Last week we ran a competition to guess the record number of McDonald’s orders by a single driver in a week. The result? A whopping 253. (I really hope that guy gets a loyalty discount).

The fact that McDonald’s are the biggest player in delivery is not news. Anyone who has worked as a delivery driver will know that the local Maccies is usually the busiest spot for orders. But just how dominant are McDonald’s?

We estimate that McDonald's is the biggest merchant on all three major platforms in the UK and accounts for a significant portion of all of their deliveries.

*These are Rodeo estimates. Just Eat % only looks at orders delivered by Just Eat rather than those delivered by restaurants. Uber % includes Uber Direct orders as well as Uber Eats.

In terms of actual number of orders we cannot be precise but we conservatively estimate that there are more than 100 million McDonald’s deliveries across all the platforms each year (which is about 15% of the entire UK takeaway delivery market).

What does the future hold? The (multi) billion pound question.

The second biggest company in the UK delivery market is Domino’s with about 45m orders. However, the pizza giant has taken a very different approach: it almost exclusively sells directly to customer and uses its own drivers.

There are some signs that McDonald’s may look to move in a similar direction. We estimate that there are now in the region of 10m delivery orders each year placed in the McDonald’s app (fulfilled by Uber Direct and included in the Uber market share above). Although this is still only about 1 in 10 McDonald's deliveries, it has grown from zero quite quickly.

Were McDonald’s to make a push towards more direct ordering then it would be a game changer for the entire UK delivery market (Just Eat could be serious trouble). It would also have a big impact on drivers: this could be positive or negative depending on how the fulfillment works.

From an efficiency perspective there would be a phenomenal opportunity for greater efficiency if all McDonald’s use the same order stacking and dispatch system. At the moment there are frequently orders being taken in the same direction by different drivers on different platforms. However, all of the platform are heavily reliant on McDonald's and will do everything they can to keep them.

Watch this space.