Last week Joanna
Fantozzi a Senior Editor for Nation's Restaurant News and
Restaurant Hospitality posed a great question; Do you know where your
food is being cooked? According to Steven
Johnson Grocerant Guru® at
Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® most Americans simply don’t care who
cooks dinner as long as it is not them.
Here are some facts:
- Recent
Grocerant ScoreCards found 82.3% of consumers don’t know what’s for
dinner at Noon, and 61.8 %don’t
know what’ s for dinner at 4PM.
- Roughly 63.7% of
consumers purchase prepared food items from a retail location at least three
times a month.
- 79.6% all dinners have at least 1 grocerant niche
Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 66.6% have two meal
components per day.
- When asked if they wanted to cook dinner from scratch
or assemble dinner from fresh meal components 91.3 % of Gen Z chose
assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components and Millennials 83.4% chose
meal components.
- Seventy-three percent
of retail prepared food purchases are taken to go
- 88.2 % of consumers
prefer hand held food over sit down meals with a knife and fork
That
said we want to share Joanna
Fantozzi article as we believe you will find it as interesting as the team
at Foodservice Solutions® did. Here we go:
“Since
the rise of the ghost kitchen several years ago, trust and transparency have
consistently been issues that third-party delivery aggregators have tried
to address through tougher operator guidelines and by cracking down on
redundant brands, like
Uber Eats did earlier
this year.
But
this week, a TikTok user @cammy_yam, aka personal chef Auntie Cammy, went viral
with a behind-the-scenes video introducing her audience to her virtual
restaurant business where she delivers food through DoorDash. In
the video —
which has now been taken down — she was proud that she made $10 by delivering a
loaded salad with shrimp to a customer at 3 a.m., though users were quick to
criticize her business as “ghetto” because she was running her food business
out of her home.
In
response, Auntie Cammy defended herself, commenting back that DoorDash “knows
I’m doing it from home, and they sent the equipment to my home knowing I’m
going to be cooking here” and showed off a “Welcome Kit” box that she was sent
by DoorDash.
Since
the video went viral on The Daily Dot, DoorDash said that Auntie Cammy’s
virtual restaurant has been taken down from the DoorDash platform for not being
compliant with local laws and restrictions.
“Restaurants
operating on DoorDash are required to comply with all applicable laws
and regulations,” a DoorDash spokesperson said in a statement.
“If DoorDash learns of any operation in violation, we will swiftly
remove them from the platform.”
While
DoorDash says it supports businesses with varying business models, all
operators must follow the company’s merchant terms of service, which requires
business owners to follow local laws and restrictions. While these laws vary by
city and state, operators have to follow local guidelines to provide proper
paperwork. Houston city law, for example — where Auntie Cammy was selling meals
on DoorDash — stipulates that all hot meals sold for consumption must be
prepared in a commercial kitchen.
Auntie
Cammy was able to bypass these regulations by signing up through DoorDash’s
self-serve merchant onboarding process without speaking to DoorDash
representatives. Small business owners must provide basic information of their
business as well as a tax ID number when signing up to sell food via DoorDash.
Every merchant that signs up receives a welcome kit in the mail identical to
the one Auntie Cammy was showing off in her video. If DoorDash gets wind of
operators attempting to bypass any company guidelines or local laws, the
perpetrators are quickly taken down from the platform.
It
would be easy to dismiss Auntie Cammy’s ill-fated viral video as a one-off
instance of a home seller slipping through the cracks, but there have been
several examples over the years of people showing off on social media how much
money they’ve made selling food out of their homes through an aggregator.
Three
years ago, one YouTuber posted a video that racked up over
three million views detailing his time selling frozen pizzas out of his home
through Uber Eats. He noted how easy it was to get started on Uber Eats, pay
for advertisements through the platform, and order from his own “restaurant” to
set up his business with a five-star review. Another YouTuber similarly posted
a video about his own experience opening up a DoorDash restaurant
from his balcony. More recently, local Chicago news station WGN9
News investigated
a virtual restaurant calling itself Blackbird (likely to copy the
Michelin-starred Chicago restaurant) after an Uber Eats driver complained that
he had to deliver food from this alleged restaurant that was operating out of
an apartment complex. The driver reported his findings to the local Department
of Health and the operation was swiftly ordered to shut down.
Some
of these instances — alongside other issues like redundant virtual storefronts,
underperforming ghost kitchens, and otherwise mislabeled or misleading
aggregator listings — have likely been the impetus for platforms to crack down
on these shady restaurants. Uber Eats’ new policies for example, stipulate that
all restaurants must “meet all relevant licensing requirements and to follow
all food regulations—including food safety regulations—and industry best
practices. Restaurants must maintain valid food establishment licenses and/or
permits.”
Grubhub
similarly updates its policy language to match the gist of DoorDash’s and Uber
Eats’ updates, further stating that all Grubhub operators must provide a
“federal tax ID number that matches the brick-and-mortar location of the
restaurant.” Although none of these compliance policies from DoorDash, Uber
Eats, and Grubhub appear to explicitly ban virtual restaurants operated out of
a home kitchen, the policies in place should make it very difficult for a home
chef to register with one of these aggregators services, and for local health
departments to shut down an illegal restaurant.
However,
these at-home virtual restaurant brands that have gained traction on social
media are likely not the only illegal foodservice operations slipping through
the cracks. Once their noncompliance goes viral on TikTok or YouTube or is
covered by the local news, they have been universally shut down by the health
departments and by the aggregator companies. Right now, it seems like it’s much
easier for aggregator companies to spot noncompliant operators in the aftermath
of public attention and subsequently kick them off the platform, than it is to
deny their application to begin with. However, these policy crackdowns are
hopefully a step in the right direction.”
Success does leave clues. One clue that time and time
again continues to resurface is “the consumer is dynamic not static”. Regular readers of this blog know that is the
common refrain of Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.
Our Grocerant Guru®
can help your company edify your brand with relevance. Call 253-759-7869 for more information.
