• by Steve Ellwanger , February 21, 2023

Delivery service DoorDash lost a record $1.4 billion in 2022 even as it tallied all-time highs in monthly active users and orders.

Driven largely by continued growth in the convenience and grocery store categories, the company best known for delivering restaurant meals posted a 34% increase in revenue to $6.58 billion.

Monthly active users in Q4, ended Dec. 31, rose to 32 million from 25 million in the year-earlier period, while subscribers to the DashPass subscription service exceeded 15 million at year’s end—a roughly 50% increase from 2021.

Total orders rose 27% last year, to 467 million.

The biggest bright spot in the past two quarters came in the convenience and grocery store channels—up more than 80% in Q3 and 60% in Q4.

“So it still continues to grow at meaningfully higher growth rates compared to the restaurants,” president and COO Prabir Adarkar said on an earnings call with financial analysts last week.

DoorDash did not break out the financial performance of its restaurant-delivery business.

According to Adarkar, “a growing number of new customers” start their DoorDash experience with non-restaurant delivery.

“It is a source of customer acquisition because there might be customers out there that didn’t find the restaurant they were looking for. And now they find DoorDash interesting because their favorite grocery store, their favorite convenience store, is on the platform.”

Adarka added that “early signals” seem to suggest that “customers who order from both restaurants and non-restaurant categories have an increase in their order rate.

So both of these things are important reasons for us to continue building a multi-category in order to be all things local commerce for our cities.”

As of last month, DoorDash and its Caviar subsidiary held 65% of U.S. meal-delivery sales, followed by Uber Eats (23%), Grubhub (10%) and Postmates (2%), according to Bloomberg Second Measure.

DoorDash chose to highlight grocery delivery in its Super Bowl advertising debut earlier this month.

Creative from in-house studio Superette and The Martin Agency was designed to put “a fresh spin on the work we’ve been doing to expand the perception of DoorDash as more than restaurants,” CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried said in describing the new “We Get Groceries” campaign.