Restaurant owners look to bring delivery in-house after Covid-19 restrictions end
Restaurant owners are claiming that commissions charged by food delivery companies are too high in the difficult circumstances caused by the Covid-19 shutdown.
Uber Eats and Deliveroo have reduced their commissions from 35 per cent to 30 per cent, while Deliveroo has temporarily dropped all commissions on pick-up orders and cut its commission to 5 per cent for orders for which the restaurant provides its own delivery drivers.
But a report in The Sydney Morning Herald reports says that operators are looking to ditch the platforms once the Covid-19 restrictions finish.
Jessi Singh, owner of Melbourne venues Horn Please and Daughter In Law, said they will “keep doing our own delivery even when this is over”.
"A lot of restaurants like me will start employing our own drivers,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “The reason these apps came in is a lot of Australians didn't want to do these jobs, maybe after this is over people will say 'a job is a job'."
Sydney restaurant group Merivale is using its own staff to do deliveries, while Melbourne restaurant Bistro Gitan is offering delivery hampers and pick-up.
"If I was Uber Eats I would have cut commissions as soon as this happened, if they had come to the table a lot of restaurants would have used their platform first," Bistro Gitan co-owner Edouard Reymond told The Sydney Morning Herald. "Now they have done the damage to themselves and a lot of restaurants have worked out how to do it themselves."
Reymond said it had taken a week to figure out how to set up delivery routes.
"But we learned from our mistakes and this weekend we did 250 deliveries and it worked really well," he said.
Sheridan Randall, 14th May 2020
