Functional Activation and Logical Pathway of Food Safety Quasi-Regulation on Food Delivery Platforms

Since the Food Safety Law first established the legal liability of food delivery platforms, the public law approach to governing platform food safety has progressively matured. Nevertheless, the current regulatory tools deployed by takeaway platforms primarily originate from commercial contracts, which exhibit significantly inadequate binding force, punitive force, and deterrence over merchants and riders. Constrained by ambiguous empowerment of platform autonomy and ineffective sharing of collaborative governance tools and faced with novel risks generated by elongated supply chains, the predominantly government-led external governance model struggles to respond rapidly to hybrid online-offline food safety risks. This paper examines the practice of food safety quasi-regulation on takeaway platforms, focusing on the root causes of the malfunction of the platform self-governance mechanism. We propose that by integrating external norms with internal rules, a panoramic governance framework be constructed featuring stakeholder participation in rule design, multi-entity collaboration in rule execution, and dynamic rule adaptation by societal actors. This framework aims to reshape the connection and integration of all links in the governance of food safety on takeaway platforms, thereby enriching and expanding the interface between platform quasi-regulation and post-hoc government regulation.