Dinner deliverance
Choosing local Nosh delivery service helps Boulder’s independent restaurants survive
by John Lehndorff
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etween COVID variants, ingredient shortages, and hard-to-find workers, Boulder restaurants have struggled the past two years. One thing that has helped them survive has been the pandemic-driven boom in takeout and delivery food. In the spring of 2022, even bistros that had disdained delivery had to embrace packaging their cuisine for transit to local homes. However, the restaurants had a rude awakening when they realized just how much it cost them for third-party food delivery services like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. “Basically, if you order from your favorite restaurant through these services, 30 percent of what you’re paying are commission fees for the big delivery services,” says Nick Graham, director of operations for Nosh, a service which delivers food from Boulder restaurants. Restaurants either swallow that charge as a cost of marketing or raise their prices to compensate, which consumers may find indigestible. Nosh is a different model for food delivery service. It is 80 percent owned by Boulder restaurants, employing local drivers and capping the delivery fee at 15 percent per order. It turns out that who delivers your food is just as important as where you order it from. “It seems like 15 percent is a sustainable amount to charge that works out for the restaurants, the drivers and the company,” Graham says. The City of Boulder likes this local solution to food accessibility so much that it is extending its program to pay delivery fees for Nosh customers and commission fees for restaurants through the end of February. Many U.S. cities are capping third-party delivery fees to no more than 15 percent per order, but Boulder has not. Nosh’s Nick Graham previously worked in a Fort Collins restaurant and saw the delivery challenges first-hand. “The problem is that the delivery services aren’t local restaurant companies, they’re technology companies. They’re known for pushing hundreds of thousands of orders a day. It shows in their customer service. Their call centers aren’t local so it’s hard to communicate with drivers and to complain about orders. It shows in their fees because the fees are hurting local businesses,” he says. Another Nosh difference is a focus on food freshness. “DoorDash may collect 10 orders from a single busy restaurant and deliver them in one trip. That means a lot of food sitting on the bar getting cold. The timing of the order is related to when the driver will arrive at the restaurant. The idea is that when the driver is walking into the restaurant the food is just coming out of the kitch-
JANUARY 13, 2022
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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
