North Coast Grub ends deliveries
Mar. 12—North Coast Grub, a delivery service that launched in February, has stopped taking food deliveries.
Owner Jakki Millo said she was no longer able to find local drivers following a backlash to her company's business model. She is advertising for drivers and said the service could return.
Millo expanded to the North Coast amid a rush of other delivery companies. Slurpalicious, an online ordering platform that started over the summer, had recently begun deliveries. Global delivery giant DoorDash announced it would launch later this year.
Most delivery companies charge a commission to participating restaurants and customers for the convenience of delivery. North Coast Grub charged restaurants nothing but posted their menus on its website, marking prices up at least 20% to customers and adding a delivery fee. The business model drew the ire of some restaurant owners, who said Millo reposted their menus without permission.
Rita Schuyler, the owner of Geno's Pizza & Burgers, offers in-house delivery service but said North Coast Grub used her menu without permission and misrepresented her prices to customers.
"They are using our name and photos without our consent," Schuyler wrote on Facebook earlier this month. "Their prices are not ours. They have marked up your cost by 30% over ours. So if you live in our delivery area, please continue to use us and save money."
Millo described the incident as a miscommunication and said she removed Geno's from North Coast Grub's website after hearing from Schuyler.
Tony Kischner, the owner of Bridgewater Bistro, said he discontinued both North Coast Grub and Slurpalicious shortly after joining.
"We quickly found both services to be too cumbersome to work with and not a good fit for our business type," he wrote in an email. "Our hard-working staff was also not happy that all tips left by customers for orders picked up by the delivery services went exclusively to the drivers."
Genelle Mosley, a driver for Slurpalicious, drove for North Coast Grub but said she quit soon after because of issues with orders not being ready, a company provided charge card not working and what she described as the company pocketing most of the earnings.
Mosley said the breaking point came when she took a $16 order from McDonald's that came to around $27 through North Coast Grub.
"I did the math," she said. "It was like $11 left over. They (North Coast Grub) paid me $4.07 on that order, and they pocketed almost $8. I was done."
Millo called Mosley's account untrue, saying North Coast Grub collects the surcharge in prices to market restaurants, but that drivers keep the delivery fee and tips. She described the drama unfolding on social media over her business model as a "witch hunt" when all she wanted to do was help restaurants on the coast add delivery service.
"It's not that we're re-creating the wheel, and it is not illegal for people to do what we're doing," Millo said. "It's a new concept to Astoria. This is something that happens all over the U.S. It's very common.
"It's no different than someone going down and buying bottles of water at Costco and selling it in their shop for six times or 30% (more) or whatever they want to mark up," she said. "That's their prerogative. And nobody says anything about it."
Millo said she recently sold a similar operation, The Rock Eats, that she ran in Castle Rock, Washington, to a driver, because of the stress caused by her experience in Astoria.
"This is very, very upsetting to me, since the whole reason for it was to help out the community and the restaurants," she said.
