Joe Hargrave, co-owner of San Francisco’s Tacolicious restaurants, says customers who come in and sit down for lunch have no idea that all the hustle and bustle in the kitchen has very little to do with serving them.
At the bar near the kitchen, an employee rushes around to handle all the incoming food orders from a third-party delivery app called Caviar. Even before the restaurant opens, online orders often pile up from Caviar, Uber Eats and DoorDash.
Hargrave says the apps account for more and more of the restaurantâs lunch business. While lunch sales for Tacolicious are down 35 percent, lunch revenue is up 8 percent. Co-owner Sara Deseran says third-party delivery apps have changed how the two run the place.
“As long as we will be delivering food, which I donât see that ever ending,â Deseran says, âthen we have to adapt every single thing we do.”
For instance, the delivery app Caviar says its customers wanted food in bowls. Now Tacolicious is serving food in bowls. The restaurant had stacks of plates on the bar. Now theyâve replaced half of the plates with stacks of to-go boxes. Tacolicious is even making changes to their staff to accommodate the apps.
As we sat in the restaurant talking, Hargrave received an email.
â[Itâs] from our VP of Ops talking about a new position that he wants to put out for third-party sales because he wants to keep the boxes organized and he wants to make sure the food is organized, and that we donât miss a beat,â says Hargrave. âAnd we can go as high as $17 an hour!â
Tacolicious already has a person to manage customer phone calls, many of which happen to be about issues with deliveries.
You might have seen someone working one of these third-party delivery app jobs at other restaurants. Theyâre usually behind the bar, surrounded by tablets. The tablets are running all the different delivery apps.
You also might have seen the delivery workers for the apps. They are often on mopeds, and still wearing their helmets when they come into the restaurant.
These workers are paid by the order, which means theyâre rushing into the restaurant to grab food and make their deliveries as quickly as possible.
Deseran says the apps create all kinds of chaos that restaurants have to manage.
âWho is going to be dealing with these orders?â Deseran asks. âWill we have another person taking these orders? Will it be its own position? Where will we store the compostable trays? Itâs almost like you are running an entirely different business on top of your business,â Deseran says.
A third-party app food delivery worker transports food on his bicycle. Tacolicious co-owner Sara Deseran says third-party delivery apps have changed how she runs her restaurant. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
When something goes wrong with a delivery, the restaurant often has to deal with it. The restaurant gets the angry customer phone calls and the bad Yelp reviews.
Venture capitalists have poured billions of dollars into these third-party apps. Over the last few years, the apps have been vying for market share and trying to get people used to ordering food online.
The companies make revenue by taking a cut of the orders. Some of the companies siphon off as much as 30 percent from each delivery total. Profit margins in restaurants are notoriously small. So even though restaurants might get more business through the apps, they may actually be losing money on each order.
Hargrave believes all this could get worse as the companies transition from using venture capital to build market share to trying to make real profits.
“Whatâs going to happen to the rates when they start killing each other and one reigns supreme and they have to make a profit?â Hargrave asks. At that point, he says, diners may be so accustomed to the apps that restaurants have to serve them.
‘I didnât do this to put food into boxes. I like food, but I like giving food to people and seeing them interact with it.’Joe Hargrave, Tacolicious co-owner
The National Restaurant Association is steering its members toward embracing the apps as a way to reach customers and sell more food. It sees this as the future that restaurants must conform to in order to survive.
Hargrave and Deseran own five restaurants, which has allowed them to adapt to the apps. For instance, they can negotiate lower rates to be taken from each order and hire people to manage all the third-party apps.
Smaller mom-and-pop restaurants donât have these luxuries. So many donât use the apps, which means that as more and more people order delivery, they could lose out.
At Tacolicious, Hargraveâs big worry is that heâll have to compromise on his food to feed the delivery apps, like adding preservatives to his tortillas.
Deseran says theyâve already taste-tested their food after itâs been driven around for 20 minutes in a car. So, like, food marinated in a Uber?
“Yes,” Deseran says, “pine scent and all.”
Jokes aside, Deseran says she wishes they didn’t have to do delivery at all because of how it affects their food.
âYou end up having half the quality when it arrives,â says Deseran. âBut people, I think, have become accustomed to having food thatâs mediocre.â
GrubHub and Uber Eats are also testing ways to make food stay fresher during transit. But Hargrave says that when it comes down to it, what he really loves is having people actually come into the restaurant.
âI didnât do this to put food into boxes,â says Hargrave. âI like food, but I like giving food to people and seeing them interact with it.â
Eating at a restaurant, Hargrave believes, is one of the last bastions of human connection that isnât mediated through an app.
And he would prefer to keep it that way.
Copyright 2018 KQED