Digital food platformization in Algeria: Reconfiguring markets, marketing and consumption practices -The case of Yassir Food

Food systems are increasingly changing under the impact of digital transformation, from the digitalization of marketing and transactions toward the rise of platform-based market organization. This paper explores the movement from food digitalization to food platformization in Algeria via an exploratory case study of Yassir Food, a prominent digital food-delivery platform in Algeria. The study draws on scholarship on digital platforms, market formation, platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, digital consumer culture, and online food delivery to examine how platformization transforms market intermediation, marketing practices, and everyday food consumption. The qualitative case-study design combines documentary analysis, analysis of publicly available platform functionalities and information, and thematic analysis of relevant scientific literature. The results indicate that Yassir Food is not simply a digital intermediary bridging restaurants, couriers, and consumers, but an increasingly market-shaping infrastructure that organizes visibility, access, promotion, information, convenience, and consumer choice. There are three interconnected transformations: a reorganization of food market intermediation, a move from traditional digital marketing to platform-mediated marketing and increasingly digitally mediated foodconsumption practices. The Algerian case further demonstrates that platformization can generate market access, stimulate innovation, enhance consumer convenience, and produce new forms of dependency, potential forms of data asymmetry and algorithmic influence and competitive reconfiguration. By investigating these dynamics in the institutional and socioeconomic specificities of an emerging market, the article contributes to the growing literature on food platformization.