How iFood increased sales by 84% among international users with Verify

Challenge

As a sponsor of COP 30, iFood was expecting an increase in international traffic on its application, so it needed to ensure that it could authenticate international users quickly and at scale, without relying on expensive shortcodes purchased individually for each country.

Solution

Using Twilio Verify, iFood now offers international authentication through a single product, streamlining operations, opening up a new revenue stream, and increasing sales through international authentication by 84%.

• Full implementation in 14 days
• +84% increase in sales with international authentication
• Low latency in client authentication
• 8 seconds to deliver a WhatsApp message, compared with 23 seconds for other Meta partners.
• 48% of the sign-ups made since February 2026 are from international users

How iFood increased sales by 84% among international users with Verify

There are times when a technical decision needs to be made within days, and what seems like an urgent situation turns into an opportunity. That’s exactly what happened with iFood in the run-up to the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30).

COP30 took place November 10-21, 2025 in Belém do Pará, and this was the first time that Brazil had ever hosted the event. iFood was an official sponsor, and faced a tight timeline and unprecedented operational demand.

According to estimates, more than 40,000 visitors were expected to attend during the main days of the conference. Government leaders, scientists, activists, journalists, and delegations from nearly 200 countries arrived in Belém, and many of them would inevitably get hungry.

For iFood, the largest food delivery platform in Brazil, this was a unique opportunity. But it came with a challenge that the company had not yet addressed: how could people with foreign phone numbers place orders on the platform?

The answer to that question ultimately became a new source of revenue and a turning point in the way iFood approaches its communications infrastructure.

Fragmented technology

Before discussing what iFood managed to build, it’s important to understand the challenges the company had to overcome. For years, the company approached messaging as many large tech organizations do when they grow too fast: each department solved its own problems as best it could.

Different teams hired different providers. Push notifications, WhatsApp, and SMS campaigns. Each channel had its own vendor, its own logic, its own budget.

The result was a fragmented communication strategy. The company lacked a centralized view of costs, consolidated metrics, and—worst of all—any real assurance that messages were reaching their destinations.

That’s why iFood’s product team developed Faster, an internal platform that now centralizes about 80% of the company’s communication, bringing together audience segmentation, A/B testing, analytics, and multiple messaging channels in one place.

Faster was iFood’s solution to managing a variety of demands. But even with the platform up and running, a new challenge was about to emerge. And it would have a fixed deadline.

When the planet sat at the table

COP 30 wasn’t just any event; it was the largest climate conference in recent history, being held for the first time on Brazilian soil, right in the heart of the Amazon. It attracted an unprecedented number of international visitors to Belém (and to Brazil as a whole), with credit cards in foreign currencies and real appetites to satisfy.

iFood, as a sponsor of the event, spotted the opportunity. But the company soon realized that its platform had a serious flaw: the authentication process for new users relied on SMS to verify phone numbers. For Brazilian users, this worked well. For someone with a phone number from Germany, Japan, or Nigeria, it was a recipe for disaster.

The traditional approach to solving this type of problem is to purchase short codes—dedicated short numbers registered with local carriers in each country—which make it possible to send SMS messages with a high delivery rate.

The problem is that short codes are not plug-and-play. Each country requires a separate registration process, with its own bureaucracy, deadlines and costs. To cover the main countries represented at COP 30, iFood would have to purchase short codes for dozens of different markets, a task that would take months and, according to the team’s internal estimates, cost more than BR$100,000 in SMS infrastructure alone.

There was neither time nor the budget for that. And, even worse, there was one major uncertainty: iFood had no way of knowing which countries the users who would try to place orders would be from. The demand was inherently unpredictable. Investing heavily in country-specific short codes would be a shot in the dark.

Twilio Verify: the solution that arrived before the problem turned into a crisis

This is what led to the introduction of Twilio Verify. Instead of configuring short codes for each individual country, iFood began using Verify as a single layer of authentication for international users. This solution works globally, eliminating both the need for local sign-ups and market-specific hurdles, all while offering coverage for virtually any phone number in the world.

The logic is elegant: instead of iFood having to know in advance which countries its users would come from, Verify manages this challenge transparently by selecting the most appropriate channel and provider for each number in real time. The flexibility that iFood needed, and that the short-code model could never offer, was right there, available from the very first deployment.

Another decisive factor was latency. In an authentication flow, the user is waiting. They’ve entered their number, are looking at the screen, and every second that passes without the code arriving increases the likelihood of them abandoning the process. In this scenario, Twilio Verify delivered the codes with the lowest latency tested by iFood's technical team. That difference, at scale, meant thousands of orders either completed or lost.

The implementation was led by the team responsible for Faster and fit seamlessly into the platform’s existing architecture. Twilio’s technical support team, described by the iFood team as fast and highly qualified, ensured that questions were answered promptly. And this special differential is highlighted as a key factor in choosing and maintaining the partnership.

84% increase in sales with international authentication

COP 30 took place. The visitors arrived. And international orders started coming in.

iFood saw an 84% increase in GMV from international users authenticated with Twilio Verify. A revenue stream that simply did not exist before and that was made possible by a technical decision made under pressure, with a tight deadline and a limited budget.

The result repositioned the project internally. What began as an emergency solution for a specific event ended up showing that iFood had been leaving money on the table for years by failing to address international authentication. This, in turn, sparked a broader discussion about how the company could scale this operation beyond COP 30.

Operational visibility has also improved. With centralized international authentication via Verify, integrated with Faster, the team now has clear metrics, predictable costs, and the ability to monitor delivery in real time. And this scenario was the exact opposite of the fragmentation that had plagued iFood's messaging system for years.

Beyond COP 30: building the infrastructure of the future

iFood doesn’t focus solely on the next quarter. According to public statements by CEO Diego Barreto, the company aims to be an AI-first enterprise, prepared for a future in which artificial intelligence agents will operate systems autonomously, scaling operations without proportionally increasing labor costs.

Within this framework, communications infrastructure plays a central role. And our partnership with Twilio is evolving alongside it. iFood is moving forward with a pilot of Bulk Messaging (a beta feature from Twilio that allows for the orchestration of multiple channels with automatic fallback, such as from RCS to WhatsApp) with the goal of making campaigns more efficient and reducing operating costs.

RCS in particular, is seen by the team as the next major channel. The bet is that, as the RCS ecosystem matures in Brazil, iFood will be positioned to scale up with an advantage.

What began as a solution to authenticate visitors to COP 30 turned out, in hindsight, to be the starting point for a smarter, more visible communications architecture that is better prepared for what lies ahead. And this is all because, at some point, someone had to figure out how to order from iFood.