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.

The problem of food waste constitutes a multifaceted systemic challenge, fundamentally stemming from the cumulative effects of uneven distribution of regulatory authority, disproportionate allocation of risks along the supply chain, and neglect of critical factors such as food security. These factors collectively give rise to complex governance dilemma, including the diversity of governance actors, competitive yet cooperative dynamics among subsystems, and iterative convergence challenges within governance processes. Distributed governance, as an innovative model, leverages its parallelism, scalability, and fault tolerance mechanisms to address these issues by reshaping the traditional funnel-shaped organizational structure reliant on hierarchical administrative commands. Through the construction of parallel systems of responsibilities and rights, along with scalable governance tools, distributed governance enables a transformative shift in the legal regulation of food waste, moving from interactional imbalances to structural realignment. This model ultimately fosters a dynamic regulatory paradigm that facilitates collaboration among all stakeholders involved in the food chain, encompassing producers, consumers, and regulators.