Food delivery loophole allows teenagers to buy tobacco

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It has been discovered that teenagers can purchase cigarettes from local retail and cigarette stores in some cities like Beijing and Jinan, eastern of China, via food delivery platforms, including China’s two biggest platforms Meituan and Baidu.

Services of the delivery platforms are categorized into snacks, beverages, instant foods, etc. If searching with keywords like cigarette on these platforms, nothing shows up. Under a category named “hard to quit”, cigarettes appear under different names and images and can be purchased.

As the screenshot from one of the food delivery platforms shows, the name and the picture description for cigarettes have been changed to something which is not censored. /Weibo Photo

“These platforms should have monitored the merchants. It is so annoying and disappointing,” a parent said to Jinan Daily.

Customer services for these platforms told Beijing Youth Daily that the companies forbid merchants from selling tobacco and that is the reason people cannot find anything when searching with words like cigarette and tobacco, but it is hard to detect them if these stores changed the name of the products.

Nowadays, online food-delivery platforms are increasing customers’ choices and convenience, allowing people to order from restaurants with just a few taps on their phone.

To widen the service and increase the number of customers, these platforms can also provide services to deliver anything from nearby stores.

Zhou Xiang, a residence living in Chaoyang District, Beijing, said that she once ordered luxury make-up on Meituan and they delivered it within one hour.

In China, there are strict regulations on the sale of tobacco. Only merchants with permits and licenses can sell tobacco to adults.

According to China’s Protection of Minors Act, since it is very hard to make sure if the customers online are adults, it is forbidden to sell tobacco on any online store.

With the expansion of these platforms, problems and loopholes have also appeared, stirring controversies as well as discussion about how to set up protections and regulations in the industry.

Meanwhile, regulations in the food delivery industry have only gradually been established. In Jan. 2018, the Online Food Safety Supervision and Administration Measures were released, strictly regulating safety issues in China's food delivery industry.