Fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making approach for online food delivery (OFD) companies evaluation and selection: A case study in Vietnam

Nguyen, N. B. T.; Lin, G. H.; Dang, T. T.

The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted the growth of the online food delivery (OFD) market in every corner of the world. In Vietnam, the food delivery service is rising rapidly and opening a large gateway of opportunities for numerous OFD platforms, also making it a competing business market in this country. Thus, to keep up with the ever-changing market dynamics, there are numerous measures and dimensions for the OFD entrepreneurs to take into consideration towards sustainable development. This paper’s objective is to evaluate major OFD companies in Vietnam based on a comprehensive set of criteria, which are social and environmental criteria (healthy and safety, information security, and environmental impact), economic criteria (delivery cost, operational capability, and risk management), service quality (order fulfillment, delivery speed, convenience of payment, online/offline service level, and customer feedback), and technology (web design, realtime tracking systems, and marketing techniques). To achieve this objective, this work proposes a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)-based framework combining the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and the weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS). The FAHP is used to generate criteria weights in which fuzzy set theory is applied to translate the linguistic evaluation statements of experts. Then, WASPAS is used to rank the OFD companies against the selected criteria. The evaluation criteria that have obtained maximum weight priority in the FAHP analysis are “convenience of payment”, “delivery speed”, “online service level”, “order fulfillment”, and “delivery cost”. From the final ranking of WASPAS, Foody is today the best performing OFD player in Vietnam regarding the selected criteria, followed by GrabFood and Now. The proposed methodology can be an accurate and robust evaluation model for the industry, while the managerial implications of this study provide significant materials for decision-makers in the OFD market in improving their businesses towards sustainable development. © 2021 by the authors.