from the DoorDash Madison website. This is a Dasher.
A few months ago, Rockhound Brewing Company owner Nate Warnke got a call from DoorDash, an online ordering and delivery company gearing up to launch in Madison. It wasn’t the first time Warnke had been approached by a company like this — a number of similar platforms have asked to partner with Rockhound since the brewpub opened in 2016. Each time, he’s said no. “If I want a delivery service, I’ll shop them out myself,” he tells Isthmus.
Then, on July 7, Rockhound got an order from DoorDash. Warnke was out of town that day, so his staff treated it like a regular to-go order. The kitchen prepared the food, but the delivery driver never showed up. Eventually DoorDash canceled the order. “That kind of set me off,” Warnke says. “It made us look bad from a customer standpoint. The customer doesn’t know that there’s an intermediary there — they think that we just weren’t able to fulfill an order.”
Founded by Stanford University students in 2013, DoorDash is an on-demand food delivery service similar to Uber Eats, GrubHub and EatStreet. It’s a Silicon Valley “unicorn,” that is a startup valued at more than $1 billion. Charging a flat delivery fee of $1.99 per order, the company uses a network of independent contractors to fulfill orders and has a presence in about 850 cities nationwide. DoorDash launched service in Madison June 19, according to its website, and there are nearly 200 local restaurants to choose from on the app.
DoorDash apparently scrapes the internet for menus and puts everything it finds on its app. This appears to give the service a massive array of options ranging from fast food to fine dining spots that normally would never do delivery. Many restaurants sign up voluntarily — Wendy’s and Chipotle have inked delivery partnerships with DoorDash — but others are added without their knowledge or permission.
In response to a request for comment DoorDash provided the following statement:
“For the majority of our merchants, being on DoorDash offers not only an additional influx of customers and revenue but also presents an additional marketing opportunity. For those not interested in being on DoorDash for any reason, we immediately remove them from the platform upon their request.”
Several local restaurants had no idea they had been added to the DoorDash platform, and a few were shocked when contacted by Isthmus for this story. “This is really bizarre — they never contacted us,” says Jenny Griep, general manager of Osteria Papavero. “I’m not opposed to the service, but this is not necessarily something our restaurant would benefit from.” Trish Davis, owner of Field Table, was similarly troubled: “I had no idea.” Davis says she plans to ask DoorDash to remove her restaurant from the app.
Caitlin Suemnicht, chief creative officer of Food Fight Restaurant Group, says about 15 of the company’s 19 restaurants initially showed up on DoorDash. After a manager noticed, Food Fight employees started testing the DoorDash service. “We couldn’t seem to get an order within two hours of placing,” she says. Another concern: DoorDash also had outdated menus listed on its app, and a number of dishes had allergens incorrectly identified. And since there was no contact with the restaurants, there was no way for the restaurant to indicate if it was closed for a private event. “It was too scary for us,” Suemnicht says.
Food Fight had previously announced a partnership with Madison-based delivery service EatStreet and also uses ChowHound for carryout orders. Suemnicht says she’s not opposed to DoorDash, but the apparent problems with the service’s rollout led Food Fight to request removal from the app. “We struggled quite a bit to get restaurants removed,” she says.
This isn’t the first time DoorDash has drawn the ire of restaurants. In-N-Out Burger, a regional chain based in California, tried for more than a year to get DoorDash to remove its logo and menu from the platform and filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in 2015. Earlier this year, a family-owned restaurant in suburban Chicago filed a similar lawsuit in federal court and is seeking class action status. The owners learned they were on DoorDash after getting complaints from “disgruntled customers” about cold food and late delivery, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Warnke ended up filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau of Wisconsin and had to track down DoorDash to get payment for the order his kitchen made and had to throw away. He eventually recouped the $19 and got Rockhound removed from the platform, but Warnke says the the experience represents “a systemic issue” with the way the DoorDash does business.
“What I don’t think DoorDash understood is that Madison’s restaurant community is two things: It’s very competitive, and very tight knit. We all talk to each other,” he says, adding that the DoorDash debacle has been widely discussed on social media. “The joke online was, ‘Is it possible for restaurateurs to run someone out of town?’”
