Forget queuing at the fish and chip shop, or schlepping to the Chinese for a chow-mein-to-go. These days takeaway is all about delivery, from the chap on the doorstep with the pizza box or the burger in a bag. Figures released by Just Eat, the website platform that represents 27,600 British restaurants offering delivery, show the market has grown from £5.5bn in 2015 to £6.1bn in 2016.

This won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who lives in London or one of the 70-plus cities that delivery company Deliveroo operates in. Their bike riders, complete with huge turquoise boxes on their backs, cut an alarmingly top-heavy swathe through the traffic. And London-only competitors Amazon Restaurant and UberEats have been launched with plenty of publicity.

These three brands represent what the industry calls “aggregator delivery”, where a single operator provides both the online ordering service and the delivery from a number of restaurants. But while they are creating a lot of buzz, they and their ilk represent only a tiny proportion of the delivery market. The real explosion is outside the capital among the small takeaways and restaurants who have traditionally catered only for “eat in” customers.