Maine Bay & Berry offers limited delivery, and when the fresh seafood market and cafe in Lemont does deliver to customers, owners Shaun Knight and Christa Stofferahn handle it personally.
So one can imagine their surprise when a man came in on June 25 to order a cooked lobster roll that wasn’t being sold at that hour and insisted that he needed it for a delivery. The man informed Knight that he was a Grubhub driver and had received the order through the third-party delivery platform.
That’s when Knight and Stofferahn realized what other restaurant owners locally and around the country have found in recent months: Grubhub added their business without their knowledge or consent.
‘We had no partnership with them. I never talked to them nor ever wanted to work with them,’ Knight said. ‘They unilaterally forced us to be part of their platform without our permission.’
It came as surprise to Knight and Stofferahn, as well as to hundreds of people who commented on and shared their Facebook posts about it, but restaurants across the United States have been speaking out about the practice by not only Grubhub but also its competitors. Knight has since spoken to about 20 local restaurant owners who have had similar experiences, as well as others from outside the area.
Adding non-partner businesses is a practice similar services like Postmates and DoorDash have employed for years, but Grubhub has only done so since late 2019. The service finds a menu online, adds the restaurant to its ordering options (with marked up prices to account for the service’s take) then has the driver place the order with the restaurant and pay for it with a company debit card.
Knight said after calling the company’s customer service line, a Grubhub representative ultimately put a temporary hold on Maine Bay & Berry orders and told them to have an authorized owner fill out a form to be removed from the site altogether within two to three days. Maine Bay & Berry was permanently removed from the platform the following day, a Grubhub spokesperson said.
‘The ironic part about that was they never had an authorized owner to be put onto their system,’ Knight said.
Four more drivers came in that afternoon for Grubhub orders before Maine Bay & Berry was removed from the app and website, where there is no indication of whether or not a restaurant has willingly partnered.
‘The driver shows up not knowing any of this,’ Knight said. ‘We end up having to refuse them… So when we have to refuse the orders then [customers] get upset with us. ‘Why is Maine Bay & Berry reneging on their obligation to be part of Grubhub?’ And I have no way of contacting these customers to tell them we had nothing to do with it.’
A Grubhub spokesperson said that the ‘vast majority’ of orders are and will continue to come from the service’s more than 200,000 partner restaurants.
‘Starting in late 2019 in select cities across the country, we’ll add restaurants to our marketplace when we see local diner demand for delivery so the restaurant can receive more orders and revenue from deliveries completed by our drivers,’ the spokesperson said. ‘This is a model that other food delivery companies have been doing for years as a way to widen their restaurant supply, and we’re trying it as well to close the restaurant supply gap created by our competitors.
‘We strongly believe partnering with restaurants is the only way to drive long-term value in this business – which is why we support efforts by local officials in Philadelphia and other cities across the country to prevent non-partnered restaurants from being listed on platforms without the restaurant’s prior consent.’
Besides turning away customers, Knight said being added without permission presented multiple other problems.
For one, the menu used by Grubhub was outdated and inaccurate and prices were increased by about 20 percent.
‘We’re being penalized and our reputation’s being harmed by just the mere fact of them putting up an incorrect menu and charging higher prices,’ he said. ‘People are assuming when they look at that, ‘Oh their prices must be higher now. Maybe that’s not the market I want to be in.”
The Grubhub spokesperson said the company has ‘an internal process to identify and handle adding these restaurants, and we work to provide accurate menus and hours for these restaurants on our marketplace based on available information online.’ Restaurants that want to be removed or have information updated can email restaurants@grubhub.com.
Maine Bay & Berry doesn’t deliver prepared foods and deliveries of its fresh food are handled by Knight and Stofferahn primarily because of quality and safety concerns.
‘For us, and the health department is very careful about this with us too, it’s time and temperature. You’ve got to make sure it cannot sit for very long or seafood is going to go bad,’ Knight said. ‘When I’ve talked to other businesses that use [Grubhub] willingly, one of their frustrating issues is that they will have to make food sometimes two or three times on any given day because Grubhub drivers don’t show up for an hour, an hour and a half after what they were scheduled. So they have to throw the food out and remake it. So if you can imagine that on a plate of pasta, how frustrating that is, imagine what it’s like on fresh seafood. We’d have have to be throwing it out every 20 minutes.’
Knight said if a customer got sick from seafood that took too long to be delivered, the customer would likely sue Maine Bay & Berry, not Grubhub.
‘We made a strategic decision not to partner with them for a variety of reasons, that being one of them, that we can’t control the product,’ he said.
A disclaimer on the Grubhub website states the service ‘does not warrant… the safety, quality, and/or timing of a delivery ordered on the platform, and/or the food or other products delivered.’
‘Food quality and safety is of the utmost importance, and our drivers are required to use the appropriate insulated hot/cold delivery bags to ensure food quality,’ the Grubhub spokesperson said. ‘We aim for speedy and efficient delivery to limit the amount of time that passes from when the order leaves the restaurant and is delivered to the diner.’
In a letter to shareholders last October, Grubhub, which had seen a 43 percent drop in its stock at the time, acknowledged adding non-partner restaurants is ‘expensive for everyone, a suboptimal diner experience and rife with operational challenges.’ But, it provided ‘an extremely efficient and cheap’ way to expand inventory and close the gap on competitors already employing the same practice.
The company hoped that non-partner restaurants would see the value and decide to become partners.
Knight, though, said the delivery services are ‘bullying’ small businesses, making it easier to simply stay on, either as a partner or non-partner, than be permanently removed from the platform, adding that he has spoken to some businesses who say they requested removal and were added again months later.
‘My contention has been, how can the shareholders find conscionable this approach of beating up small businesses who have no interest in being a partner with them,’ he said. ‘I have absolutely no issue with a business sitting down with Grubhub and saying, ‘We want to be a partner. We want to offer a delivery service, and we want you to do it for us. Here’s the agreement; let’s sign it and go on.’ I’m absolutely fine with that. There is no way they can unilaterally mandate a partnership with a business that doesn’t want to be a part of it, and that’s the problem.’
Knight said he has filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s consumer fraud division and is reviewing legal options.
The attorney general’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.
DoorDash, Postmates and Grubhub have each faced trademark lawsuits over the years stemming from the practice, but each case appears to have been settled or dropped. Various efforts have urged state and local legislators to enact legislation forbidding services from adding restaurants without permission.
Postmates has been employing the practice for most of its nine-year existence.
‘We’re a pick-up service representing the customer; we’re not a delivery service representing the restaurant. There’s a big difference,’ a Postmates representative told Eater in 2015.
Knight, meanwhile, said whether through legal processes, advocating for legislation or speaking out, he hopes to see a change that will prevent restaurants from being unwittingly added to third-party delivery services.
‘It’s not right. It’s unethical, immoral and predatory, at best,’ he said. ‘This is thousands of businesses being affected by this and they’re just running rampant and not caring about the responsibilities they have as a company… It’s happening every day. They’re not stopping and it’s going to continue happening in this area. ‘
