How much time does running GrabFood and GoFood yourself take?
Part one: the initial setup
The most common owner assumption sounds like this: "I uploaded the menu, now it works by itself." It does not. Without optimization for in-app search, without the right structure and order of items, without the right photos, the listing simply is not shown to people searching your category. This is not a question of diligence or of time — it is a question of knowing how the ranking works. The initial setup cannot be done without that, no matter how many hours go into it.
Part two: why ads here do not work the way you expect
This is what almost nobody gets. Grab and Gojek are not ad networks. An ad network earns on impressions and clicks, and therefore auctions you a place in the results. Grab and Gojek earn a commission on orders, and their core asset is their own audience. Everything else follows from that: their ranking algorithm depends first of all on how well you monetise that audience.
The practical consequence: your cost per click amplifies your position but does not create it. A restaurant that turns an impression into an order and holds a high average check is worth more to the platform — so the platform lifts it on its own, because it earns more from it. Which is why the hard part here is not "setting up ads" but understanding how to attract that audience and sell to it with high conversion and a high check. That part is the work; bidding is only the amplifier.
Part three: what happens every day
Say the setup is done and ads are running. What begins then is what usually never makes it into the time estimate:
Items switch off during the day — by the kitchen, the till, the platform itself. Every hour a bestseller is off is orders going to the restaurant next door and a signal to the algorithm that you are unreliable.
Replies must be fast and to the point. A separate skill is contesting an unfair review so the platform removes it: very few people know how, and on a young account one such star costs more than it looks.
Offline hours and cancellations hurt ranking most, and recovery is slow — the platform needs a new history.
Auto-bidding collects cheap irrelevant impressions. Manual management means adjusting to actual results, not configuring once.
What counts is not orders from the promo but what is left after the discount, the platform commission and the ad spend. A promo that does not pay back looks like growth.
Opening a report is not the work. The work starts when something in the menu, the bids or the prices changes because of it this week.
The honest conclusion
Put it all together — not just setup and weekly analytics, but stop-list control, review replies, negative handling and contesting unfair reviews — and what you get is not an owner’s side task but a full-time employee working on delivery every day. So the real choice is not "do it myself or hand it over" but "hire and train my own person, or hand it to a team that already runs this".
Frequently asked
How many hours a week will this take me?
We do not publish an hours figure, because the honest unit here is a role, not hours. A restaurant at 500 orders a month and one at 3,000 differ in volume, but the daily task set is the same — and it does not fit into "a couple of hours on Fridays". Done properly rather than as report-reading, it is a full-time function.
I upload my menu and switch ads on — is that enough?
That is what most owners do — and why most conclude that "delivery does not work". A menu uploaded as-is is not optimized for in-app search; ads on such a listing buy views without orders. What works is not what is switched on, but what is set up.
Am I better off hiring in-house or handing this to an agency?
Yes, and for a large chain it makes sense. Just count honestly: that person’s salary, the time to train them, and the fact that they will learn on your accounts and your mistakes. An agency has already paid for those mistakes on other restaurants.
What do I lose if I run delivery on the side?
Not one-off revenue — position. Ranking is cumulative: switched-off items, slow replies and unanswered negatives accumulate into the account’s history. Regaining position costs more and takes longer than holding it.
What we find on an account like yours
Not hypotheses — what shows up in the first days when we open the dashboard of a restaurant that has been running delivery on its own.
The typical picture is 40–70 items switched off at once, with individual dishes stuck in the stop-list for over 2,000 hours. It is not negligence: items get switched off by the kitchen, the till and the platform itself during the day, and only someone opening the dashboard daily brings them back in time.
Of the revenue lost, 95% is switched-off items. A closed restaurant accounts for 3%, cancellations for 2%. Which means the most expensive part of the job is not strategy or ads but the routine an owner doing this on the side never gets to.
Ads stop paying back at roughly 6% of revenue: below that line the median ROAS is 12.1x, above it 8.6x, and 42% of the restaurants in our fleet are already past it. You only catch the crossing with daily management — once a month you see it in a report, after the money is gone.
The Bali median is one negative review per 138 orders, and reviews are bimodal: 51% five-stars against 28% one-stars, with only 3% fours. Around 80% of the appeals we file with Grab end with the review removed — but that is a separate skill and separate time, and it is the first thing to drop when delivery gets whatever time is left.
Keep reading
Two ways to go from here
Both work. The first costs nothing and does not require us.
The method and the norms — open and free
The five stages we run on every account, published in full. Alongside them, market norms from 96 restaurants so you have something to compare your numbers against.
An audit of your listing
Paste your restaurant’s Grab link and the report comes back in a couple of minutes: menu and search, photo coverage, reviews, prices against the neighbours. Free, no strings; after that it is 10% of delivery revenue with no upfront payment.
Diagnose my listingor message us directly →