Hunton Retail Law Resource

Disputes between restaurants and third-party food delivery services—such as Grubhub and Uber Eats—have made headlines over recent years. This tension has only been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 was a particularly tough year for restaurants across the country and even tougher in cities like New York where rents are high and state-mandated business closures resulted in significant cuts to already narrow profit margins. However, the same has not been true for third-party food delivery services. In 2020, food delivery apps saw substantial increases in revenues. Uber Eats, for example, reported revenues of $2.51 billion in 2019; that number jumped to approximately $3.5 billion for the first nine months of 2020.