“At the start of the pandemic, food delivery apps, including the ‘Big 3’ — Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash — were hailed as saviors, facilitating a takeout boom meant to keep restaurants and their staffs working,” reports Dean Kuipers in FERN’s latest story, published with Mother Jones. “But eateries were quickly confronted by a harsh reality: These Silicon Valley and Wall Street–backed firms, which together dominate 93 percent of the market share nationwide, are designed to scrape money out of local businesses — sucking up a combined $9.5 billion in revenues in 2020 alone — and send it to shareholders. Meanwhile, without dine-in customers, some restaurants were trapped in a money-losing proposition; 110,000 of them closed, either permanently or long-term, in the first year of the pandemic.”
In cities around the country, Kuipers explains, restaurant owners are fighting back, forming local-delivery co-ops in an attempt to drive the third-party interlopers out. “A recent report from the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance looked at 20 startups offering local delivery services and found that they could disrupt the big apps by offering lower commissions to restaurants, better pay for delivery personnel, and better hospitality.”
Kuipers focuses on Jon Sewell, a restaurant owner in Iowa City who, in 2018, joined with fellow owners to form a delivery co-op called Chomp. Chomp now works with nearly 200 local restaurants, and Sewell has gone on to help start a co-op, Nosh, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and LoCo Co-ops, an unaffiliated company that has launched five more enterprises across the country and is now organizing in Chicago. “I have nothing positive to say about Silicon Valley and what tech has done to our society,” Sewell says. Local delivery co-ops are “my way of fighting back.”