A new law just came into effect in California on January 1 that prohibits food delivery programs from naming restaurants under their offer without first explicitly contracting with those restaurants.
It may be an obvious thing to assume that all restaurants one finds on DoorDash, Caviar, Grubhub and so on have agreements with the apps to sell their food there. Not so! At least until a new one was passed in the California Legislature last year, Grubhub and its sister site Seamless had a custom of listing restaurants and their menus on their sites and programs to appear to have a wider variety than competing programs. . In some cases, the app will simply serve as a middleman (as Postmates has been doing for a long time), pick up from the restaurant, send a driver to pick up and deliver the legal order, and then any fees in the pocket, but without any contract with the restaurant.
And while this story has been bubbling up elsewhere, it blew up in San Francisco in February last year when the Michelin-starred Thai place Kin Khao – who had never picked up or delivered until the pandemic began – made a call for ‘ received a Grubhub customer. impatient about a delivery order.
In that case, it turned out that there was also a mix-up between Kin Khao and a Thai “ghost kitchen” – a kitchen kitchen that cooked only food for delivery, without a brick-and-mortar restaurant – of a similar name , Happy Khao’s menu was incorrectly marked by Grubhub. But the story, and the online rage of Kin Khao owner Pim Techamuanvivit, has led to more attention being paid to the use of non-consensual menus and restaurants.
As Eater reports, other Bay Area restaurants have fallen victim – as in the case of Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland, where a long outdated menu placed in one app caused orders to be placed that had to be canceled. , and the app blames the restaurant rather than blaming itself.
Grubhub responded to the scandal by saying that it was merely an “initiative” to include more “high demand” restaurants in their offer, saying: “Kin Khao was one of these restaurants that we added to our market ‘for this initiative to include more restaurants in our platform, and unfortunately we have referred to the wrong menu for this restaurant.’
California San Diego-based Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez proposes the September 2149 Assembly Bill, which bans the use of these non-consensus offerings, forcing apps to talk directly with restaurants act before including them in their offerings.
This means that thousands of restaurants are likely to disappear from Postmates, DoorDash and others owned by Uber – apparently out of the 700,000 restaurants in the Postmates app, only 115,000 had partner contracts with the app, according to the Wall Street Journal. And as of the third quarter of 2020, Grubhub has not had any contracts with approximately 55,000 of the 300,000 restaurants it offered delivery to.
So selection is going to get narrower on most of the applications, and not just in California. According to the Journal, Minneapolis has already passed a similar ordinance on licensing restaurants, as well as other cities, including Philadelphia, Denver and Tucson, Arizona. The state of New York appears to be the next state to pass a nationwide law like California, sometime this year.
But come on … as far as “growth strategies” go, it’s been a shady one, and it’s far from the only way delivery programs have proven to be harmful parasites in an industry that no longer needs problems.
Related: San Francisco limits commission on food delivery programs to 15 percent
Photo: Kai Pilger