You’ve Nailed Instagram. You’ve Nailed TikTok. Now Your Delivery App Wants Video Too

Your delivery platform is becoming a content platform

This is not hypothetical.

Deliveroo has introduced in-app video content for restaurant partners, with videos appearing in Highlights carousels across the app and directly on restaurant menus. It actively suggests content showing things like

• Dish preparation

• Popular dishes

• New launches

• Portion sizes

• Chef specials

Videos can be up to 60 seconds and, naturally, portrait is preferred. (help.deliveroo.com)

Read Deliveroo’s in-app video guidance

So, congratulations. Your burrata now needs a content strategy.

And it is not just Deliveroo.

DoorDash has a dedicated Video Library for merchants, allowing restaurants to upload videos, tag menu items, use video as a store header and even measure what it calls video-driven sales. It has also built an Instagram connection that lets businesses bring existing photos and videos into their DoorDash store page. (merchants.doordash.com)

See how DoorDash is using restaurant video

Uber Eats is moving in the same visual direction too. Its UK merchant terms explicitly include video within merchant marketing materials that can be used in the app and within sponsored listings. (uber.com)

Read the Uber Eats UK merchant terms

The point is not that every delivery platform suddenly wants to become TikTok.

The point is that the places where customers make decisions are becoming much more visual.

Same phone. Different job.

This is where things get annoying.

Because technically, lots of these platforms want roughly the same thing.

• Vertical video

• Good lighting

• A clear subject

• Food that looks like something you would voluntarily spend £18.50 on

TikTok recommends full-screen vertical creative, high-resolution footage and content built specifically for the platform. (ads.tiktok.com) Meta similarly recommends vertical video with audio and key messages kept within the safe zone for Reels. (facebook.com) YouTube Shorts now supports square or vertical videos of up to three minutes. (support.google.com)

TikTok’s Creative Codes

YouTube’s current Shorts guidance

But that does not mean you should post exactly the same edit everywhere and call it efficiency.

Each platform is asking the content to do something slightly different.

• TikTok needs personality, pace and a reason not to swipe

• Instagram Reels should reinforce the wider brand and give people something worth saving or sharing

• YouTube Shorts can carry a little more information and have a different discovery life

• Delivery app video has a much simpler job. Make me hungry. Show me what I am ordering. Remove enough uncertainty that I press add to basket

Same footage.

Different context.

Please do not organise another five content shoots

This is the bit hospitality brands need to get right.

The answer to another platform asking for video is not another completely separate content strategy, another shoot and another folder called FINAL_FINAL_DELIVEROO_V3.

It is better content planning.

If you are already shooting your menu, think beyond the Instagram post you need on Thursday.

Get

• The clean close-up with no text on screen

• The chef finishing the dish

• The sauce pour

• The packaging shot

• The hand picking it up

• A few seconds of the kitchen

• A wide version where it makes sense

• A vertical version

• Clean footage without platform-specific stickers, captions or trending audio baked into it

Create the raw material once, then give it different jobs.

Suddenly your content shoot is not producing six Reels.

It is producing an asset bank for

• Instagram

• TikTok

• YouTube Shorts

• Paid social

• Your website

• Email

• Delivery platforms

Yes, all of them.