By Brazil Stock Guide — Brazil’s antitrust watchdog, Cade, has intensified its scrutiny of the country’s food delivery market as competition heats up among delivery platforms. A technical paper prepared by the Administrative Council for Economic Defense, as Cade is formally known, shows that practices such as exclusivity, price-parity clauses, aggressive subsidies, ranking algorithms and restrictions on the use of multiple platforms are now at the center of global antitrust concerns involving food delivery apps.
This week, Cade’s tribunal decided to reopen an investigation into 99Food, reversing a decision by the agency’s investigative arm to close the case less than a week earlier. The case began with a complaint filed by Keeta, the international food delivery brand of China’s Meituan, which accuses 99Food of using contractual clauses that could restrict restaurants from working with rival platforms.
The reopening of the case gives practical relevance to the technical paper prepared by Cade’s Department of Economic Studies. The document reviews international cases involving online food delivery platforms. It is not a ruling by Cade’s tribunal, nor does it accuse any specific company in Brazil. But it offers a technical roadmap of the types of conduct that competition authorities around the world have started to examine in digital delivery markets.
Food delivery is no longer merely a convenience service. In Cade’s view, delivery platforms have become an important economic sector, connecting consumers, restaurants and couriers in multi-sided digital markets. These markets tend to concentrate because the more consumers a platform attracts, the more restaurants it brings in; and the more restaurants join, the more consumers use the platform.
The key concept is multi-homing — the ability of restaurants, consumers and couriers to use several platforms at the same time. When multi-homing is easy, competition tends to be stronger. When contracts, financial incentives, loyalty programs or algorithms limit that freedom, new entrants may struggle to reach the minimum scale needed to compete.
That helps explain why disputes involving iFood, 99Food, Keeta, Rappi, Uber Eats and other platforms have become increasingly relevant in Brazil. According to competition specialists, the central question is not only whether a platform holds a dominant position under traditional market-share metrics. The issue is whether certain clauses, incentives or restrictions can prevent rivals from reaching critical mass in a market where scale, strategic restaurants and network effects are decisive.
This is exactly the type of concern described in Cade’s technical paper. The study says competition authorities in several jurisdictions have been examining restrictions on multi-homing, exclusivity clauses, most-favored-nation rules, lock-in effects, subscription programs and ranking mechanisms that may influence how restaurants appear inside delivery apps.
Most-favored-nation clauses, also known as price-parity rules, are especially sensitive. They can prevent restaurants from offering lower prices through other channels, such as their own websites, phone orders, WhatsApp or competing apps. Platforms argue that these rules prevent consumers from using the app only to discover a restaurant and then completing the order elsewhere. Competition authorities, however, worry that price parity may reduce price competition and discourage restaurants from developing their own sales channels.
In digital markets, competitive power may not appear only in aggregate market share. It may lie in a platform’s ability to lock in key restaurants, block rivals’ expansion paths, offer selective incentives, control data, influence rankings or create switching costs.
One of the most important areas of concern is exclusivity. For regulators, exclusive contracts may be legitimate in some circumstances, especially when they involve investment, promotion or a clear economic benefit. The problem arises when exclusivity prevents important restaurants from being available on rival platforms, making it harder for competitors to enter or expand. In markets with strong network effects, locking up popular restaurants may be enough to keep a new platform from reaching minimum scale.
The document also draws attention to algorithms. On digital platforms, potentially anticompetitive conduct does not always appear in a written contract. It may emerge through the way an app organizes search results, highlights offers, distributes traffic, ranks restaurants, grants badges, recommends establishments or penalizes partners. That makes it harder to identify discrimination, self-preferencing or favoritism toward private-label brands.
This matters because it changes the type of evidence regulators need to examine. Instead of looking only at contracts and emails, authorities may need to understand ranking systems, databases, visibility criteria and advertising mechanisms inside apps. That pushes antitrust enforcement into a more technical arena: the audit of algorithms, data and platform design.
A third major area is aggressive subsidization. Coupons, free delivery, temporarily reduced commissions and courier bonuses can benefit consumers and partners in the short term. But Cade’s paper shows that regulators have been asking whether these tools, when used by heavily capitalized platforms, can prevent smaller rivals from growing. The concern is not the discount itself, but its potential to accelerate market capture and reinforce network effects.
Regulators are also paying closer attention to minority shareholdings between companies operating in the same sector. Cases such as Amazon/Deliveroo, Prosus/Just Eat Takeaway and Delivery Hero/Glovo show that antitrust risks do not always require formal control. A minority stake may give a company access to strategic information, influence over decisions or an economic incentive to reduce rivalry between firms that should otherwise be competing.
In the European case involving Delivery Hero and Glovo, that concern moved beyond theory. The European Commission fined the companies after identifying coordinated practices between firms that were still supposed to operate independently. For Cade, the example is relevant because it shows the thin line between a legitimate corporate negotiation and the improper early integration of competitors.
The conclusion of Cade’s paper is that the food delivery market requires continuous monitoring. The sector is dynamic, tends toward concentration and operates through mechanisms that are not always visible to consumers, restaurants or regulators. For that reason, the study calls for stronger investigative and analytical tools, as well as closer attention to structural transactions and remedies designed to preserve competition.