The best delivery services in Milan

Milan is the city with the most delivery services in Italy. Whatever food, drink, product or service you need at short notice, you can have it at your door.

It happens that after a long day seeing the city you want to relax and take it easy, without giving up on eating well.

Anyone staying in an apartment, like ours, often uses delivery for basic groceries too — water, bread, fruit — for the whole trip, which makes meals easier to plan and saves money. Don’t skip the section at the end, where we go through the details of ordering to a place that isn’t your own home.

Or you might want to pick up a few ingredients and cook something good using the kitchen you have, perhaps with a good local wine or a dessert to enjoy in front of the TV.

If you feel like eating at home, want to treat yourself, or need something quickly, these are the best delivery services you can use while you’re in Milan.

The best delivery services

Service	Best for
Glovo, Deliveroo, Just Eat	Prepared meals
Winelivery	Wine, beer, spirits, ice
Glovo, Everli	Supermarket groceries
Glovo	Over-the-counter medicine
Cortilia	Fruit and vegetables from local growers
Tannico, Callmewine	Bottles to take home

Food delivery

The three most used apps in Milan are Glovo, Deliveroo and Just Eat. There are small differences between them, but none is better than the others, especially for anyone using them occasionally, on holiday or for a short period. Prices and fees can vary depending on the dish, the distance the rider has to cover and other factors. So the advice is to download them and take a look at the menus — worst case you uninstall them: signing up takes a moment, they’re free and they all do the same job.

Glovo

What sets Glovo apart is that it covers more categories: restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, tobacconists and an “anything” option where you ask the rider to buy something from a shop that isn’t in the app. It’s also the most widely available outside the center, and its coverage of Isola is complete. Many local pizzerias and burger places deliver through Glovo.

If you expect to use it a lot, the Glovo Prime subscription costs €5.99 a month and saves you €2.50 per delivery, and you can cancel whenever you like. The app is on the App Store and Play Store.

Deliveroo

Deliveroo has, on average, a wider selection of restaurants across Milan. If you plan to use it a lot, the Plus Silver subscription costs €2.99 a month and removes the delivery fee on restaurant orders over €15 and on shop and supermarket orders over €25. Plus Gold starts at €3.99 a month and drops the threshold to €10 across the board, with service fees always discounted. The app is available on the App Store and Play Store.

Just Eat

Just Eat is the third, perhaps the least used, but it still has a catalog drawing heavily on chains and neighborhood pizzerias. One small note: it’s arguably the most ethical choice. For now, it’s the only company in Italy to have hired its riders as employees, giving them more protection and proper pay. If you care about that as much as we do and you can’t decide between them, we’d go with them. The app is on the App Store and Play Store.

Grocery delivery

To fill the fridge as soon as you arrive, the fastest route is still Glovo, which has supermarkets inside the app and delivers them on the same timescale as prepared food. The catalog is smaller than in the physical store and prices are slightly higher, but for tomorrow’s breakfast and for water it does the job.

Everli works differently: it sends a person to shop in an actual supermarket, with the chain’s full range, and delivers within a time slot you choose. It’s worth it for the big shop in your first days, less so for something quick.

Cortilia sells fruit, vegetables and products from small growers in northern Italy — it’s worth trying a few Italian delicacies. Standard delivery costs €9.99 and becomes free over €109 of shopping, so it makes sense for anyone staying several days, not for a weekend.

The local supermarket services, like Esselunga a casa, Carrefour and Coop, work well but require registration, booking a time slot and often a high minimum order. On top of that, the sites aren’t available in English, which can be an obstacle. For a short stay they take longer to set up than they’re worth.

Wine, beer and spirits

Here it depends on what you need.

Winelivery delivers in Milan in about 30-45 minutes. It sells Italian and foreign wines, craft beer, spirits, ready-made cocktail kits, and also water and ice, which is the detail that saves the evening when you discover there’s nothing in the freezer. The minimum order runs from €10 to €15 depending on the city, and delivery becomes free above a certain threshold.

It’s the service that solves the evening when you’ve already decided to stay in and you want to try a few glasses of local wine, or you need a last-minute bottle to celebrate with. As an alternative, take a look at the food delivery apps too: on Glovo, for example, you can search for La Prosciutteria, a place in Isola, and have some good Tuscan red brought over.

Tannico and Callmewine are Italian wine retailers with far deeper catalogs, better prices on serious bottles and courier shipping. If you want something to drink right now, they’re no use; for taking home something you found in a wine shop they’re the right answer, because they handle the international shipping instead of you handling it in your suitcase.

Medicine

Pharmacies are on the Glovo and Just Eat apps: they deliver over-the-counter medicine, baby products and health and beauty items in half an hour or a little more. Prescription medicines can’t be delivered: you have to go to a pharmacy with your electronic prescription and its code.

There are also apps built specifically for delivering medicine in 30-60 minutes, such as Pharmap and Pharmercure. They’re worth a look if the options on the general platforms are thin.

Other products

Glovo again will bring you flowers, household products, cigarettes and anything else you could buy in a shop nearby, using the function where you write what you need and where from. It costs more than the product does, but in the evening it’s the only way to get hold of these things without leaving the house.

For specific products, Amazon delivers in Milan same-day or next-day across much of its catalog: for a forgotten phone charger, for instance, it’s cheaper than any rider.

Ordering when you’re staying in an apartment

Three things that don’t concern you in a hotel and do concern you here.

Write the address out in full, with the street number, and put the name that’s on the intercom in the notes field. If there’s a problem the rider will call, but it’s better to give clear information up front.

The Isola restricted traffic zone doesn’t stop deliveries. The neighborhood’s zone is in force every day from 7:30 p.m. to 6 a.m., but it doesn’t apply to bicycles, motorcycles and mopeds, which are what riders use.

Alcohol requires ID. Selling to under-18s is prohibited and whoever delivers can ask for it, even from people who don’t look underage.

Delivery, in any case, is plan B. In Isola the places where you eat well are all within a ten-minute walk, and we’ve listed the ones we rate in where to eat in Isola.