Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the final discussion we are going to have here at day two of the Morgan Stanley 2025 European TMT Conference, where we are very thrilled to have Ravi from DoorDash here to talk through everything going on in the industry. There is a lot going on with the company and the industry, so thank you so much for coming.
Absolutely. I was in the elevator. There was like a couple of investors. They were saying, "Oh, I'm going to go to the DoorDash thing." And they're saying, "Oh, there's a lot going on over there." I'm like, "Yeah, there's a lot going on, so let's talk about it.
There's a lot of things being delivered. We are the last thing before the bar, so we have to keep it energetic.
All right.
Just so you know.
If there was DoorDash, you could have gotten DoorDash to deliver the drinks for you.
That's right. That's right.
We're not here yet.
Yeah. First, the exciting disclosures. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. They are also available at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today by DoorDash may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and DoorDash undertakes no obligation to update them.
Please refer to DoorDash's Form 10-K or 10-Q for a discussion of the risk factors that may affect actual results. There is a lot going on. Maybe I sort of want to go back and talk a little bit about the strength of the core U.S. business, sort of what you saw in 3Q and sort of what you're seeing now as you sort of enter the fourth quarter of the year. Let's talk about the core U.S. business. What are sort of the evidences and signs of strength you have on the core U.S. restaurant business?
Sure. I mean, I think let's start with the U.S. business overall, and then I'll talk about the restaurants' business.
Yep.
The summary is that the core business is doing really, really well. It's as strong as it's ever been. Look, the business is growing at a larger scale. If you look at the third quarter, the business is much larger than a year ago, and the growth rate has accelerated for the fourth straight quarter. When you look at the underlying areas that we operate in, the restaurants' business accelerated, new verticals' business accelerated. We've gained share in both of those businesses. When I look at the operational metrics, we've had more number of monthly active users in the first nine months, twice the number compared to—we've added twice the number compared to 12 months of last year, as well as order frequency has continued to grow at the same time. You have a business where the growth is accelerating. The underlying operational metrics are really good.
Ultimately, for us, this is a cohorted business. Even when you look at the cohorts, older cohorts are engaging better. The newer cohorts are continuing to engage better with us. The underlying strength and the fundamentals of the business continue to be very strong. Most people ask me, "Is there something going on in Q3 that makes a difference?" It is not like there is something that we did in Q3 that is driving the results. I would say if you look at the past several years, the performance of overall U.S. as well as the U.S. restaurant business has been pretty strong. It is largely because of the investments we made. It is largely because of how we operate the business, which is trying to find efficiency, then taking that, continuing to reinvest back in the business.
Because the way at least I think about it is we're trying to drive durability of growth in a sustainable manner over a longer period of time. That's largely how we think about operating the business. When we generate a dollar of efficiency, look, I mean, we have a couple of decisions to make. Based on where we think is the highest IRR, do we let that drop to the bottom line, or do we invest back in the business? Our view and philosophy has been given where the product is and given where the market is. The best use of that dollar is to put it back because ultimately that drives more profit dollars in the future.
If you think about the way we are thinking about operating the business, which is drive the top line in a very sustainable, durable manner over a longer period of time, which leads to scale, that scale leads to more profit dollars, take that and reinvest back in existing or newer businesses. You're seeing that strength come through in the way we've operated the business over the last decade.
One more on the core, the strength. I know you've made a lot of changes and improvements to the app and the offerings in the app over the course of the last, let's call it, year and a half. Are there any areas that have particularly outperformed even what you thought it would do when you rolled it out that you can sort of say, "Wow, this is why we keep accelerating the business off of even larger bases?
Sure. I mean, I think that's a great question, right? I mean, I think there's not one thing, right? For us, it's always a combination of improving selection, improving quality, improving affordability on the platform. I mean, the one thing that I think investors outside often don't see is the impact of quality. We obviously talk a lot about quality, right? Like today, the orders are much faster than about a year ago. There's fewer missing items. There's fewer defect rates. The reason those things are important is because when a consumer gives us a chance, if the quality is better, they retain better. This business is not about acquiring consumers. It's all about retaining consumers because retention is the only thing that compounds over time. If you look at our U.S. business, we have a retention advantage compared to peers.
When you look at our world business, we have a retention advantage compared to peers. That's the reason we are growing faster than the market. That's the reason why we are gaining share. All of that comes from the incessant focus on making everything about the product continue to get better over time.
Okay. Let's talk about investment. That was probably the—I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a few times in the last week. That was probably the biggest surprise.
100%.
Let's start with sort of big picture. You talked about a few hundred million dollars of incremental investment in a few buckets. Maybe walk us through those three buckets in any way we should think about, order of magnitude or sizing that few hundred spend.
Yeah. I mean, I think I'll clarify a couple of things, right? Look, I mean, I think when we talk about investments, it's nothing net new that we're trying to do. We've always operated the business the exact same way. When I look at 2020, 2021, 2022, we've always invested several hundred million more than the prior year. We've built the grocery business. We've built our new verticals' business. We've built our international business. The reason the strength of those businesses exists today is because we've taken a discrete point of view that these are large markets. We have an opportunity to go build a better product. We've invested behind them. That's the reason why you're seeing those businesses grow faster than peers, as well as continue to gain share. It's largely the same thing that we're doing.
When we think about building the business, I'm not looking just at next quarter, right? What happens next quarter was already sort of done maybe three or four years ago because it's investments we made then that are producing the results now. We are sitting there thinking about how do we drive the same level of duration of growth as well as profitability in 2029, 2030. That's the investments that we're making now. The way and the philosophy in which we are operating the business has not really changed. We have the strength of the core business doing well, which is what I talked about, right? Where A, the growth continues to exceed our expectations. The profit dollars are increasing over time. For us, the best use of those dollars is continue to reinvest back because that's the highest IRR.
The reason we call it out is there's a couple of discrete things that we're doing. It's not like we're sitting there saying, "Hey, we have 2026 planning coming. That's why we want to increase more dollars." Or we're not sitting there saying, "Hey, it's fun to invest. Let's go invest," right? The way we operate at DoorDash is everything starts with a very small amount of people. It starts with a very small amount of dollars. Think about it as a one-pizza team. We experiment a lot. We put milestones in place. It's a very rigorous process before we say, "We're going to scale those investments." It's just coincidental that we're making a few different areas of investments because we've tested, we've experimented with these products. We've tested with these opportunities over the last several years, which got us to this point.
That's like sort of the broader picture. Now, going back to your question about where we are investing, I would say think of it as three sort of broad buckets. The first one is we are replatforming our underlying tech infrastructure, and I'll talk about that in a minute. The second one is software. The third one is autonomy. Of the three, the larger portion is obviously the work that we're doing around the tech platform. There are a couple of things that I want to make clear, right? We're doing that because we think it's the right thing to do, because we think it's the right thing to actually make the product better over a longer period of time. I'll give you a simple example.
In the U.S., we ran an experiment where somebody said, based on some unique insight that they had, they figured out a way to cut about 21 seconds of Dasher active time, which is the number of seconds that the Dasher is active on the platform. That leads to efficiency gains. That leads to a better consumer experience. Now, if I have to replicate that same experience across Wolt as well as Deliveroo, I have to put two separate engineering teams to work on that. I'll give you another example. I've been visiting the delivery team the last few days, and I've been digging into the product.
I've been spending more time with the team. DoubleDash, which investors in the U.S. use quite a bit, which is when you order something on restaurants or you order something on grocery, we just pop up a small thing on the screen saying, "Hey, do you want to add on a few extra items?" That feature has driven a lot of awareness, especially to new verticals in the U.S. That's how we drive a lot of organic awareness in the U.S. The feature, exactly as it exists, doesn't exist on the Wolt platform. So we're saying this is a good opportunity to drive awareness, to drive mile penetration, but somebody has to go rebuild that.
When we partnered with Wolt, we looked at this and said, "Hey, there's an opportunity for us to become more efficient because you don't need three different engineering teams to build the same features." If you have the same sort of engineering team, same features available worldwide at the same day or same time, that drives feature velocity higher. We have seen examples of this where the Wolt team is already using the underlying DoorDash tech platform for our ads engine. We have seen the gains we have had because we have had years of development, which now the Wolt team is reusing. We took a step back and said, "What if that were true for the entire platform, especially now that we have added Deliveroo as well?" That is the investment that we are making in terms of the tech stack itself.
If you break that apart, there's two costs within that. One is, given that we are doing roughly about 8 million orders a day, we're being very careful and very disciplined about how we are working on migration of the tech stack. There's going to be a period of time we're going to run both tech stacks in parallel because by the time we bring it up, we don't want to make sure there's any issues with the existing stack itself or servicing the orders that we have. Some of those costs over time are going to go away because eventually there's going to be only one tech stack that we run.
In addition, the second set of costs is the new platform natively comes with AI capabilities, which are going to speed up development, which are going to speed up the ML models that the teams have, which will speed up personalization, which is going to speed up the information that we have about consumers. That is going to be native inbuilt in the platform. That is going to be efficiency that we drive.
You don't have that now.
I mean, we have that, but every team is sort of building it on their own. The grocery team will build something on their own. The restaurants team will build something on their own. We're saying, "Hey guys, this is foundational elements. Let's just have it in the foundation." The second part is we are making it more redundant proof, which is essentially we're going to run closer to the consumer. We're going to run in multiple data centers. There is going to be some increase in cost because of that. The advantage that you get once we actually replatform the entire thing is two things. One is efficiency on the engineering side, which we talked about. You do not need three different teams doing the exact same work. The second one, which is the one that I'm excited about, is just the velocity of feature development.
Because ultimately, think about it, right? This is an industry where retention is important. Retention relies on product improvements. The faster you can roll out products, which ultimately drive the product experience better, that drives retention, that drives order frequency, which ultimately drives scale, which drives profit dollars. That is the pieces, right? That is the signal that we are seeing as well as why we think that is the right investment to make. The second one is software. This is sort of relatively simple. We partnered with Seven Rooms roughly about six months ago. We are investing behind that. We are investing in sales and marketing. We are investing in the product. We just launched a bunch of new features. We have added more merchants this year since we have acquired the company. We also have our own underlying digital ordering platform. We are also investing behind that.
The third one is autonomy, where we're trying to build an autonomous delivery platform. We obviously have our own version, which is called Dot, which we unveiled roughly about a month ago. In addition, we are doing partnerships. Ultimately, we think there's going to be different modalities because we're trying to build the most efficient logistics engine possible. When we think about investments, the way we think about it is, A, we've tested them. We feel like they're ready where they can scale. We think that there is going to be payback, obviously at different time scales depending on which area of the investment. We see signal which warrants this investment. We're doing it from a position of strength because going back to Brian's question, the core business is doing really well. It's growing. It's increasing overall profit dollars. We are looking at it saying, "Hey, how do we continue to grow as well as increase profit dollars over time?" That is the thesis we have had.
That's very helpful. There's a lot I want to dig into. Let me ask you one more on the tech stack platforming because there's a lot of examples of tech companies that have gone through tech stack platformings that go on for a decade in a couple of cases. When you're thinking about IRR and you're thinking about faster revenue growth, faster profit dollar growth from the tech stack, is this one of these investments where you may not really see material signal until 2028, 2029? Or should we think of this as you've been doing this and you might see some signals even in 2026, 2027 start to come?
Yeah, the answer is slightly differently, right? Like remember, the reason we are running both things in parallel is we're taking a very modular approach to this. And modular, what I mean by that is like say the payments module or the core Dasher engine or the consumer module, right? Like if you think about our overall tech stack, there's different pieces that essentially are orchestrated together to deliver the ultimate consumer, merchant, and the product experience. So each one, the module is going to come online to the new tech stack at different times. As the different modules come alive, you're going to start to see some of that signal early on. It's not like everything moves all at once. Some of the first modules are going to move in 2026.
The way we thought about it is we've done a lot of the design and the foundational work already in 2025. We're starting to roll out features on top of that in 2026. As some of these features, as some of these modules come alive, you're going to start to realize some of the engineering efficiency benefits. You're going to start to realize some of the feature development because things that are developed now, you write once and it's available everywhere. That's largely the way we are thinking about sort of the progress on that.
Got it. Got it. It's actually very impressive as you think about how you found that your current tech stack is not as efficient as it could or should be, and yet the U.S. business is doing so well.
Absolutely.
It could have even grown faster for longer. Okay. Let's check through the areas of investment. Let's talk about software. Maybe walk us through your and Tony and the team's sort of big picture view about how you think about point of sale. What are you trying to solve for? And what are some of the investments you have to make to sort of accomplish the goal?
Sure. I mean, for us, right, DoorDash has always been built as a merchant services company. We are a merchant-first company. We're trying to solve, we're trying to provide different solutions for merchants. Obviously, we have a marketplace offering. Remember, I mean, the mission of the company is to grow and empower local economies. I think we've deliberately chosen the words grow as well as empower because the growth portion is like, "Hey, we want to drive same-store sales growth." Merchants come online. We provide them with a tablet or we're directly integrated with them. Sales start happening. That grows overall merchant same-store sales growth. The empower portion is also pretty important because we think of that as how do we enable merchants to essentially thrive in a digital economy, right? How do we enable merchants to run their businesses better?
That's where all of the merchant services that we've thought about come into picture. The first version of the merchant service was Drive, which is essentially we went to merchants and said, "Hey, we're going to take the concept of logistics off your platform because we are a logistics company. We're going to provide logistics." Drive, as you know, has done really well. We obviously have the highest market share in that platform. Many of the top 100 merchants trust us with us powering the logistics for them. We said we're going to extend further. We built a digital ordering platform, which essentially will power merchants' first-party channel. Now, today, if you're on McDonald's or Starbucks or some of these brands, they use portions of our technology on the digital ordering side.
Number three, which we partnered with Seven Rooms because we said, "Hey, the table management plus the CRM plus the marketing, that's also important." The way we've thought about it is there's three distinct components, right? The table management makes merchants more efficient in terms of how they turn tables, how they manage them. Whereas on the CRM side, that gives merchants a 360-degree view. Like let's say Brian is on DoorDash, but at the same time, he goes to the restaurant inside the store. Now you can connect that experience that Brian has both online as well as offline. That is a very rich, powerful experience for merchants because then you have a lot more knowledge, then you can market, and you can provide a lot more ad spend towards that. That is largely how we are thinking about how we can continue to make merchants more efficient. We can help them run their businesses better as a part of the software stack that we're trying to build.
Got it. Okay. Is DashMart sort of part of that separate discussion? I think DashMart is the other part of it. Is that part of the step-up in investment, or where is DashMart in the whole?
Yeah. It is not a step-up in the investment, right? I mean, if you think about DashMart, our thesis on grocery is the reason online grocery is still sort of underpenetrated is because there are quality gaps because merchants just do not know what is on their shelf. And our thesis in building DashMart was, what if we said we could serve a reasonably large percentage of SKUs that consumers order very periodically, and we can solve that with high quality with great speed? That is the use case that we said we started out with. Our second part of the thesis was eventually merchants will want to partner with us because we know exactly what is on the shelf. We do the pick and pack as well. We know how to do the delivery or the logistics component.
It just took us several years where merchants realized that, "Hey, this is an important piece of the element." That is where the DashMart fulfillment services comes, where grocers and retailers can now come and partner with us, where they can use our own infrastructure for us to be able to deliver a portion of their product or inventory that they have. I would not call it as a net new investment because remember, we already have the footprint that we need that we are comfortable with. We are just using our existing infrastructure to be able to. It is a concept of now us partnering with more merchants. That is where DashMart fulfillment services comes into the picture.
Now, one of my favorite questions I always like to ask you, and I was very privileged and honored to sit down with you, the grocery agent. The last few years, I have always asked you, how far away are we from a Dash agent on Saturday morning saying, "Good morning, Brian. Here are your 20 things you order for your family for groceries. I found some dip that goes well with your favorite chips. Here is a coupon for a new almond milk. Do you want the 9:00 A.M. Monday morning delivery time?" And I will say yes. It seems like if you have a native AI platform and you have a growing DashMart 1P business, we could be closer. Is that a 2026 possibility, or am I missing sort of other things that need to come together?
I think like the answer is slightly different, right? I think personalization, improving the consumer experience is a very high important priority for us. That's where everything that we're doing around AI, everything that we're doing around experimentation, everything that we're doing around building essentially a native AI platform is going to come into picture. For us, the way we think about it is ultimately all of the agent work is largely around demand generation. We're completely comfortable to meet where consumers want us, whatever the experience they want from a demand or an intent generation perspective. The thing to remember is there is a physical component to our business as well. It's not just purely a commodity. The reason we have the retention advantage that I talked about is because the quality on our platform is better. There's fewer missing items. There's fewer cancellations. There's fewer never-delivered items.
All this, the combination of both the digital as well as the physical is what makes the experience on our platform better, whether it's restaurants as well as grocery, right? Our goal and focus is not just one or the other. I think we need to continue to improve both in order for the end customer experience to be greater than what it is today.
How do you think about sort of the agentic world from a first-party agent or third-party platform agent? Obviously, you'd love to have your agent, your Dash agent that communicates with me. I think you struck a partnership with GPT, sort of some of their early agentic capabilities. How are you sort of thinking through the risks and the opportunities of potentially a GPT or a Gemini wedging itself between you and the consumer?
Sure. I mean, I think for us, the way we think about it is ultimately it's another sort of traffic-generating channel for us. Today, I mean, we have multiple channels, right? People can go on Google and search for us, and ultimately they end up on the DoorDash app, largely because the experience itself is better, right? Like the express high intent and the experience itself is better. We are comfortable with all different formats. The key thing to remember, right, is it's not a commodity product at the end of the day. It's not a commodity product where there is no marginal cost for every incremental order, right? I think the difference is the experience, the quality that we provide. That is the differentiating factor and ultimately why consumers will choose one platform or the other.
The combination and focus has to be a combination of both, not just one where you're trying to aggregate the demand or generate the demand, but you also have to focus on the experience of delivery itself, which is where honestly we try to excel.
Yeah. Your infrastructure around delivery, your inventory, your innovation is never more important.
Absolutely, right? Plus the fact that we know exactly what to deliver at what point, and we know where different streets are, what the mapping needs to be on how do we get to you faster on time. I think that's pretty critical in the end-to-end experience for a consumer.
Before we get to Wolt, where you've been hanging out the last few days, the other area Spenny talked about was autonomous. I think you've actually been pretty active in autonomous announcements and headlines and sort of what's been going on and early experimentations in the last, let's call it six months. Maybe walk us through sort of the autonomous vision and sort of the multiple prongs that you're throwing at this.
Sure. I mean, I think a couple of things I'll say. We've been working on autonomy for several years now, very similar to what I said around investments, right? We start very, very small. There's always a very small team with a very small amount of resources. I think that honestly breeds creativity and innovation because there's constraints, right? Which allowed us to figure out a form factor that we thought was pretty important from a delivery perspective. Because when you think about autonomy, right, like a car itself is never going to work because a burrito is not going to walk into the car by itself. You needed a smaller form factor which can get to the merchant door, which can get to the consumer door as close as possible. We've been experimenting. We've been working on it for a while.
Ultimately, the goal for us is to build an autonomous delivery platform. That is why our concept is we have our own sort of first-party effort that we are doing, which is Dart, which we announced roughly about a month ago. We are still experimenting. We are experimenting. We are learning. We are going to start to deploy that in a couple of cities just to experiment to learn more. At the same time, we have third-party partnerships, whether it is Wing sort of on the drone side or Serve Robotics or Coco or other things. We are comfortable with both sides because ultimately our goal is to build the most efficient logistics engine, plus at the same time to deliver the best consumer experience possible. The combination of both of those means we need different modalities for different types of deliveries depending on whether package type, weight, as well as distance.
We think eventually the combination of both land as well as air, both first-party as well as third-party is going to be the right ultimate solution, which is why we're trying to build more of an autonomous delivery platform.
Got it. Okay. That'll make sense. Let's talk about Roo.
Sure.
You've been there the last couple of days. You've had a little while now with the asset sort of in the house. Let me sort of first ask you, as you now have a little more time to see what goes on behind closed doors of the company, what has been the biggest surprise for you? Because I was spending a little more time with the asset now that you own it.
I mean, I wouldn't call it a surprise, right? Like from a performance of the business, I spoke about this on the call as well. I think the top line is doing better than what we expected when we underwrote the deal. And from a bottom-line perspective, I mean, I think we're comfortable with sort of the guidance that we've given because honestly, that's what we underwrote from a model perspective. What's giving us more confidence is the strength in the top line has given us confidence to continue to invest. I mean, look, the thesis for us was large markets, attractive markets from a profit pool perspective, the business is unit economic positive, where we can make a difference from improving the underlying product.
I think we thought that there was an opportunity for us to deploy our product playbook, our operational rigor, as well as operational execution. I think the combination of that was very attractive to us. Right now, when we think about it, right, there's a lot of opportunity in most of the markets that they operate in, whether it's improving selection, whether it's improving quality, or making the product more affordable. Look, I mean, we've already had the learnings from having operated with Wolt in Europe. That's an additional sort of benefit that we have is not only do we have the product expertise in the U.S., but now we have product and improving the underlying overall delivery platform in Europe as well. I think the combination of both of that, plus the fact that it's operating in really large markets, that's the attractive part for us.
Yeah. Food delivery is always very competitive. You've had a lot of success in the U.S. Wolt has had a lot of success in some of its countries. Some of the countries, it seems Japan or Australia have been a little disappointing, at least it seems externally. Any learnings from those markets that have proven to be more challenging than perhaps you thought versus the markets you've had more success that you can sort of bring now to France or the U.K. as you sort of think about further growth for Roo?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's like every country and every market, the local nuances are very different. For us, the view and the thesis has always been we have to work on getting the product to be better, shipping features faster. Again, this goes back to why we're trying to bring all three platforms together, make them more AI native. Because ultimately for us, product development, improving the underlying product, working on the input metrics, whether it's improving selection quality or affordability. Whenever we've done that, we've seen sort of direct correlation in improvements in retention order frequency. That's going to be the thesis that we're going to operate. The second thing is our philosophy on operating the business is not going to change, right?
The goal is we always try to find improvements in your economics, take that, and try to find sustainable ways to drive growth by reinvesting back in the business. I think that is largely how we're going to think about operating Wolt. The other thing is now we have a larger platform, which is whether it's our SevenRooms offering or other offerings which we can offer in different markets. That's going to be an additional feature that we offer merchants, which is going to drive merchant stickiness as well as drive revenue as well.
What about DashPass? I know it's sort of a broader topic, and it's probably done particularly well in the U.S., but anything you'd call out as sort of levers that you have seen that are still effective in driving DashPass adoption even after all the years of that product?
Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest lever is making the underlying product better. I think the way consumers think and the way we think about it is if you're making the underlying product better, they habituate more. Once they habituate, they try to graduate to DashPass because it just makes sense. What you've seen from DashPass is it has higher retention, higher order frequency. They're earlier adopters of newer categories, whether it's grocery or convenience or retail. I think the core still remains if the underlying product is getting better, people come back, they retain more, they order more. Once they start ordering more, they're already habituated to the platform. We say, "Hey, it makes more sense for a consumer to be on DashPass." That is the largest graduation path that we've seen.
Okay. One of the questions that I commonly get asked, and actually I know you did on one public call recently, is sort of play macroeconomist about the restaurant demand landscape. There is a lot of mixed data points where some of the publicly traded restaurant results have been underwhelming. Yet both your U.S. food delivery business and your competitor's U.S. food delivery business are doing incredibly well, accelerating, etc. Is there anything as you look at your platform that would sort of explain why that is happening? Is it makeshift toward moms and pops? Is it sort of changes? What are you seeing that could sort of explain that?
Sure. I mean, I think the key thing I would say is consumers love selection. I think rather than just like one-off, I mean, people want more content, more variety. I think platforms like ours, that obviously is something that we provide, they want more choice, right? The second thing is we've tried to improve the product from an affordability perspective. If you're on DashPass, obviously there's no delivery fee. I think that helps. I think even some of the names that you're seeing, obviously I've not studied all of them, but I think they're name-specific, and I think it's not related to the overall industry. If you look at mid-market or if you look at the other brands, they're generally doing quite well. I think you're seeing that reflected in their results.
Obviously now when you are on a platform like ours, just given the choice that you have, given that the product is continuing to get better, that's obviously reflective of the growth that we've driven over the last several years.
The DashPass point is to kind of go back to that really quickly. I think as part of Wolt, you'd rolled out some more subscription products and sort of.
Yeah. We have Wolt Plus, which is doing really well, by the way.
Have you seen sort of a similar uptake or a similar reflex reaction to diners in those Wolt markets as you've sort of run the DashPass playbook in the Wolt market?
The adoption has been faster, largely because the learnings from running DashPass for the last five-plus years in the U.S. has helped us accelerate some of those learnings in the Wolt markets. When I look at the adoption from an MAU perspective, that is faster on the Wolt side compared to where DashPass at the similar age is given sort of the experience and the things that we've learned over the course of the last several years. I think subscription makes sense because ultimately we want consumers to retain more. We want consumers to order more. Once they switch to subscription, I mean, you see that as a clear distinction compared to people who are not on subscription.
Got it. I'm going to open it up for a couple of questions. One more I want to ask you just about is you look at the U.S. business and really the U.S. restaurant business and really sort of dig into the KPIs that you can invest in, that you're choosing to invest in. What are areas when you sort of look at the forward budgeting and you say, "We could invest a lot more here and drive growth"? Where is sort of the greenfield to drive growth in the U.S. restaurant business?
Yeah. I mean, I think when you think about sort of like the three vectors that we have, right, there's still a meaningful percentage of deliveries that have defects. For us, it's one of those things where you have to just look at the edges and figure out where things are going wrong and continue to work on those. Quality is one of those things where I don't think you can ever be perfect. It's something that yields a lot of rich rewards because as the quality continues to get better, people trust the platform more, and that drives, again, their engagement on the platform. On the restaurant side, I mean, one of the things is selection never gets stale because restaurants go out of business, net new restaurants get created. It's something that we need to continuously be on top of.
That's something which is an ongoing effort. We have a lead compared to peers in terms of selection, and that will continue to sort of drive gains and retention. It is something that we need to continue to work on. At the same time, we talk about affordability, right? It is a thing that we constantly think about. We continue to work on affordability by reinvesting back into the business, right? When you think about the core underlying portions of the business, there are hundreds of things that we continue to work on. Each of them, we are trying to improve by basis points every single quarter. That compounded over a long period of time is what you are seeing in terms of the results that you are seeing in the restaurant business.
Look, I mean, when you think about whether it's on the user side, I mean, still a small portion of even the overall number of people that exist, and as well as when I look at the monthly active users versus people that are at least once a year, there is a gap. We think about it and say, "Hey, why is that the case?" It always comes back to we have to continue to make the product better. When I think about order frequency, I mean, it's mid-single digits a month compared to people eat three times a day or 80 to 100 times a month, right? It's still a lot of opportunity for us to continue to improve both the user growth as well as the order frequency growth.
Perfect. One question for Ravi?
Uber just went to deal with Toast. Can you talk about does that have any impact on you guys and maybe tie it into the SevenRooms and battle over that space now?
Yeah. I mean, sure. I mean, like I said earlier to what Brian was talking about, I mean, we think of ourselves as providing merchant services. Obviously, we work with other POS players as well as we are developing our own software services. Because the goal for us is to ultimately essentially ensure that merchants can do a better job of running their own business. When you think about SevenRooms, I mean, the business is growing quite well. We've added a number of merchants. We're investing in making the product better. We just launched a Reservations Marketplace on that just about a month ago that we announced. Overall, when you think about the feature set as well as some of the improvements that we are making, you're seeing merchants really respond well to that development that we are doing.
Time for one more? Let me ask you one then. The DashPasses are so fascinating to me and the cohorts. I remember a couple of years ago we would talk about how the DashPass members age well. They spend more in year two than one, three than two, four than three, etc. Has that changed at all? Are you still seeing these DashPass members even as you're adding more, are they still aging where that is really a bigger and bigger driver of the flywheel and the GMV?
Yeah. I'll say a couple of things, right? One is DashPass had a record quarter as well as a record year. We added more DashPass members in the first nine months than we expected for the full year. Not only signups, but also the retention is getting better as we make the underlying product overall better. What we've seen in DashPass is a couple of things, right? Once consumers become subscribers, their order frequency is higher, their retention is higher. When you look at it on a cohorted basis, even the older DashPass cohorts, their engagement with the platform is increasing, which is reflective again of the product getting better. You have a combination of two things, right? The number of members is increasing as well as older cohorts are also continuing to engage more.
Both of those are ultimately driving the growth that you're seeing in the business. We still think that there's a lot more opportunity for us to have non-DashPass members graduate and become DashPass members.
Perfect. All right. Ravi, thank you so much for the time.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you, everybody.
All right. Awesome.
That was great. Thank you.