For 20 years, Grubhub and Seamless have worked with restaurants to help them grow and succeed by connecting them with new customers, driving more orders, and creating additional revenue for their businesses. We have helped level the playing field for independent restaurants to compete with larger brands by providing them with the tools to attract, retain, and maintain loyal, profitable customers. To date, we have driven billions of dollars in orders to restaurants (including $5B last year alone), helped net more than $2B in tips to drivers, and facilitated meaningful connections between the 125,000 restaurants and the 20 million active diners on our platform. 

Recently, there have been misleading stories in the media regarding our treatment of our restaurant partners. To be clear: Grubhub/Seamless is committed to transparency and to being the best partner for restaurants. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. 

In the course of engaging with government and restaurant industry trade organizations on the value we create for small and large restaurant brands, and in the spirit of continually strengthening our partnership with our restaurants, we realized a few enhancements to how we work with restaurants would benefit everyone, and help bring clarity to larger issues facing our industry. To that end, we are announcing the following three-point plan: 

1. Effective today, we are extending the look-back period for restaurants to review all phone orders from 60 to 120 days. As before, we are committed to examining and immediately refunding any phone calls that did not result in orders. Additionally, we will redouble our efforts to continuously improve processes we use with regard to phone orders.  
2. We deployed a website that makes it even easier for restaurants to request direct control of any URLs registered or microsites created as part of their contractual relationship with Grubhub. As before, we will continue to transfer ownership of these web properties at no cost to any restaurant partner who makes a request.
3. Lastly, we are setting up a series of restaurant roundtables as part of our commitment to foster more direct dialogue with our restaurant partners. Our first roundtable was held in New York City on October 1 in conjunction with the New York State Restaurant Association and included members of the City Council to make the session as productive as possible.

We are pursuing these actions following constructive feedback from restaurants, diners, drivers, and elected officials, including Senator Charles Schumer, whose staff helped us come up with this roadmap. We want to thank all our stakeholders who provided their views in an engaged and positive way. We remain committed to maintaining a beneficial relationship with everyone who uses our service. That’s why, in addition to helping restaurants grow and thrive, we have always championed our drivers – providing them with 100% of their tips – and offered the industry’s most transparent fee structure for diners.

We’re proud to be industry pioneers and leaders in food ordering and delivery, and we firmly believe these concrete steps will enable us to enhance even further the ordering experience for all our stakeholders. We invite others within the industry to examine their own practices through that same lens of transparency — for the benefit of all of our restaurants, diners, and drivers.