AI could upend food delivery — SkimNews
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- Bites, a 10-person pre-seed startup with roughly 300 Bay Area restaurants, charges a flat $1 surcharge per order versus DoorDash's 15-30% commission and lets diners place orders through ChatGPT directly to the restaurant rather than through a third-party platform.
- DoorDash sent form letters in August to Bay Area restaurants warning they may be listed on Bites without their consent, cautioning that they 'may not have agreed to Bites' terms, pricing structures, or service standards' and that such listing 'could be illegal' depending on the state.
- A Verge test order of a pizza and beverage through Bites via ChatGPT totaled $56.73 including tip, tax, and delivery fees; the same order on DoorDash totaled $70.29, with the pizza priced $11 more.
- Matt Maloney, who cofounded Grubhub and left in 2021 after its acquisition, is also a Bites cofounder — his involvement hadn't been previously reported — and argues legacy platforms' pricing is a relic of pandemic-era customer-acquisition spending that no longer applies.
- DoorDash processed 970 million orders and generated $4.5 billion in revenue in Q2, while its ads business hit $1 billion in 2024 — both the commission model and the ad business face structural risk if diners shift to ordering through AI agents instead of the app.
- Restaurateur Jay Jayaraman, with 13 restaurants on Bites, says 80% of orders once came via DoorDash versus 65% through Bites and 25% through DoorDash now, with higher margins on Bites orders and direct access to customer contact information he says DoorDash withholds.
Why it matters: DoorDash built a $1 billion ads business and a 15-30% commission model on diner eyeballs, not just on logistics — and Bites sidesteps both by plugging orders straight into ChatGPT and cutting out the app surface where ads, upsells, and boosted listings live. If agentic ordering scales beyond early adopters, DoorDash loses the discovery funnel, the upsell window, and the customer-data moat that a struck-down NYC sharing law tried to crack open.
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