Restaurants turning to ‘contactless delivery’
Concept may help to avoid wholesale layoffs
Like workers in most other fields, restaurant people speak their own language. They talk about covers when they mean customers, sourcing instead of shopping and cocktail programs, which civilians would just call cocktails. This week, an eerie new term has rippled through the business: contactless delivery.
The concept is simple. The kitchen prepares food that is then boxed up and sent out to an address where a gloved messenger quietly deposits it at the door. The hungry customer and the person making the delivery keep a safe distance between them.
It’s not the kind of service with a smile that the hospitality industry prides itself on. But for thousands of restaurants across the country, ordered to close their dining rooms to slow the spread of the coronavirus, contactless delivery may be their only chance to stay open and avoid wholesale layoffs.
From corner diners to such world-class restaurants as Alinea in Chicago (which recently made $5,600 on sales of margarita kits alone), operations focused on delivery and pickup have been adopted at a speed that shows how precarious their survival has become.
For restaurants, contactless delivery and its sibling, contactless curbside pickup, are components of a new hygiene protocol that has been adopted alongside old routines, on the fly and despite advice from health departments that can be unclear, contradictory or nonexistent. Kitchens that are accustomed to worrying about the temperature of the walk-in refrigerator now check all employees for fevers. Gloves, once disdained by serious cooks, are suddenly a necessity.
Borough Provisions, a delivery service in Manhattan and Brooklyn started this week by Bien Cuit, a string of bakeries and cafes, and Joe Coffee, a roaster that also runs several cafés, has announced a detailed safety protocol. According to Kate Wheatcroft, the bakery’s chief executive, it requires packers and drivers to wear masks, gloves and nonporous windbreakers that are sprayed with disinfectant each night.
Contactless delivery and pickup is “a very safe alternative, especially for those who are in high-risk groups for COVID-19, the older people with weak immune systems,” said Dr. Benjamin Chapman, a professor and food safety specialist at North Carolina State University.
A greater challenge is protecting the cooks.
“Practicing social distancing in a kitchen is extremely difficult,” Chapman said. He said that smaller staffs would help, and so would staggered shifts, with a pause of five minutes or so between the morning crew’s leaving and the arrival of the evening crew. Strictly monitoring the health of each person allowed into the kitchen is also vital, he said.
There are reasons for restaurants to embrace the telephone that go beyond nostalgia. The device doesn’t take a cut of each sale, unlike the big delivery services like GrubHub, Seamless and Uber Eats. Those fees, which can run from 15 to 30 per cent, rankled owners even when times were good. Now many restaurants would like to see them go away for a while.
And some of them have. DoorDash is waiving fees on pickups and for restaurants that are new to the service, while offering some reduced commissions to restaurants that already use it. Uber Eats has reduced fees to customers, but not the commission it charges restaurants.