The head of the Iowa Restaurant Association is encouraging people to order directly from their favorite restaurant, instead of relying on a third-party delivery service to bring them food.
In an industry trying to recover from a 33% drop in revenue in the past year, Jessica Dunker says those delivery services are not a big help for most restaurants.
“The third-party delivery model — a DoorDash or UberEats — these services that you call and order, that is actually not a profitable or winning model for the vast majority of restaurants,” Dunker says. “What is profitable in a winning model is if you call the restaurant directly and are willing to go and get out of the house and pick it up.”
Dunker says there’s another issue when third-party services get involved.
“We’re also more comfortable with food safety and with product quality when we are able to hand what we prepare directly to the customer,” she says, “and are not trusting that a third-party who’s not an employee of ours is transporting things maybe in a car with their kids, or their cat, or smoking, or with other passengers.”
Dunker encourages people who typically patronize a restaurant two times a week to think about going out a third time each week to help restaurants get to the other side of the economic downturn.
(By Bob Fisher, KRIB, Mason City)
