Paper short abstract:

This paper asks what new economies and practices of food consumption might be emerging around digital marketplace platforms. In exploring how these platforms match food vendors and consumers together, and who they include and exclude, it examines how platform capitalism shapes meetings around food.

Paper long abstract:

Digital marketplace platforms, from Deliveroo to Farmdrop, increasingly articulate all manner of meetings over and around food - from anonymous takeaway deliveries to elaborately performed encounters between chefs and diners at supperclubs. These platforms provide digital infrastructures designed to broker encounters and exchanges between vendors and consumers of food, intensively generating data about their users' relationships and commercial activities in order to match buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions between them. In the process, digital marketplace platforms increasingly shape the landscape of commercial encounters associated with the exchange of food - but what sorts of meetings between foodstuffs and eaters, and between producers and consumers, do they facilitate? Which other encounters might they preclude?

This paper will draw on interviews both with operators of online marketplaces for food and with businesses and individuals which trade within them to explore who is permitted to trade (and, in so doing, to 'meet with' food consumers) via online marketplaces. Specifically, it will examine the requirements that vendors must fulfil, and the forms of conduct they must practise, in order to thrive within the strictures of online marketplaces for food, and investigate how their prospects for interaction with food consumers are shaped by platforms' techniques of ranking and matchmaking. In exploring these questions, this paper will examine what new economic exchanges and social practices - and what new forms of power and exclusion - might be coalescing around food as it is transacted through an emerging platform capitalism.