DoorDash Grocery Growth Fuels 37% Marketplace Sales Jump

DoorDash used its first-quarter earnings call to press the same argument it made in Q4. The next leg of competition in local commerce runs through whoever delivers the best end-to-end experience. CEO Tony Xu said customers judge platforms on whether they got the exact item they ordered.

In Q1, that focus on execution helped marketplace gross order value reach $31.6 billion, up 37% year over year. DashPass also hit record membership signups. Monthly active users reached an all-time high.

DoorDash has spent six years documenting the physical world. Every store, every product and every item across tens of millions of locations per city. That data cannot be scraped. It does not exist in any digital repository outside of DoorDash.

“The most important thing in delivering this is making sure that we actually can do it so that we don’t just win on discovery and the upper funnel, but the end-to-end experience,” Xu said on the call. “What’s the point of having the best discovery experience if we can’t bring you that exact item?”

Xu pointed to Google Food Ordering. It drove significant traffic to delivery platforms for eight years before shutting down. The retention of that traffic was a fraction of what DoorDash retained through its own channels. Xu said customers ultimately judge platforms on price, speed, accuracy and support, not on which surface they used to find the product.

Two thirds of DoorDash’s code is now written by AI. Merchant onboarding and menu building are handled by agents. Catalog annotation and customer support are handled by agents too. Xu said AI models can now complete multistep tasks end to end, a capability that was unreliable as recently as six to eight months ago.

Grocery and Push Beyond Restaurants

DoorDash became the volume leader in grocery delivery last fall and held that position through Q1. One in every two new customers entering grocery delivery for the first time is coming through DoorDash. Mature cohorts are buying bigger baskets. The new verticals portfolio is on track to be gross profit positive in the second half of 2026.

About 30% of monthly active users order from categories outside restaurants. Xu said that number should eventually be 100%. Grocery store inventory systems don’t always know where items are. Out-of-stocks and substitutions keep online grocery from matching the in-store experience.

Dash Fulfillment Services, DoorDash’s inventory management and fulfillment offering built with grocery and retail partners, is live with a handful of partners. The company is not expanding it until it can replicate what it has built in restaurant delivery.

The global tech replatforming is unifying DoorDash, Deliveroo and Wolt onto a single stack. Production traffic is running through the new stack. A feature that previously had to ship three separate times across three brands now ships once. CFO Ravi Inukonda said the overall cost of the program has stayed consistent with what he communicated two quarters ago. Deliveroo is posting its highest growth rates in four years. Wolt is at its highest share performance across every country it operates in.

What Else Stood Out

Ads hit a record high and are growing faster than any previous year. Xu said the ads business has never performed better, with gains across CPG advertisers, SMB restaurants and retailers. DoorDash runs a lower ad load than competing platforms while delivering stronger advertiser return on ad spend.

DoorDash for Business, which includes catering, meal manager and corporate DashPass and group ordering, is growing quickly. Xu said scaling catering requires solving kitchen capacity, menu design, staffing and logistics simultaneously. The company is working through that with merchants before expanding.

Caper autonomous delivery robots are scaling in multiple markets. Xu said operating at scale under any condition requires hardened autonomy, hardware, remote operations and regulatory approvals across cities. That work is ongoing before further expansion.

Topline Results and Outlook

Q1 2026 marketplace gross order value was $31.6 billion, up 37% year over year, or 24% excluding Deliveroo. Revenue was $4 billion, up 33%, or 21% excluding Deliveroo. Total orders were 933 million, up 27% year over year. Free cash flow was $420 million. DoorDash ended the quarter with $4.6 billion in cash.

For Q2, DoorDash guided marketplace GOV of $32.4 billion to $33.4 billion.