OnDelivery.com, an offshoot of a Flushing, Queens, service, will target many restaurants not accommodated by existing services.
By Adrianne Pasquarelli
Another food-delivery service is cycling into Manhattan. OnDelivery.com, an offshoot of a similar service founded two years ago in Flushing, Queens, launched Thursday in lower Manhattan.
Like Seamless, OnDelivery partners with restaurants to deliver meals, but unlike the larger service, it employs its own couriers. Other sites, such as Postmates and Caviar FastBite, use contractors to transport goods.
"Every driver who works for us is an actual employee of our company, so we have better control and more consistency—that's our advantage over these other websites," explained James Chen, co-founder of OnDelivery.
Already, the company, which covers everything below 42nd Street, has 30 restaurants lined up, including many Chinatown-based establishments that have never before offered delivery.
It's starting with 10 couriers, a number Mr. Chen expects to grow to 50 by the end of the company's first year, based on his experience with 20-month-old FlushingFood.com.
The minimum wage for tipped workers will go up to $7.50 at the end of the year from $5 an hour. But Mr. Chen said his delivery workers will earn the state minimum wage, $8.75, plus tips.
The older company generated $4 million in business from online orders in 2014; Mr. Chen estimates that OnDelivery will bring in $10 million annually because of its larger geography. Customers must pay a processing fee of less than $5, depending on distance, and restaurants are charged $100 for registration as well as a 20% per order fee.
Yet with the recent launch of food startups such as Maple and meal-kit ventures like Plated, and existing services that have already contracted with restaurants, the delivery market is quite crowded.
Some local politicians are already voicing their support for OnDelivery. A spokesman for City Council member Margaret Chin noted that delivery issues have consistently plagued lower Manhattan, as riders use illegal electric bikes, cut corners and ignore traffic warnings in their rush to deliver food while it's still hot. But because OnDelivery employees aren't returning to the same restaurant, but rather taking orders from those sites closest to their current locations, there will be less back and forth and, in theory, less road congestion.
"We are working to improve the working conditions of delivery people, and a company like this, that offers this kind of service, is doing precisely that," said Ms. Chin's spokesman. "They've made a commitment to treating their workers fairly in terms of delivery people—and delivery people working for restaurants don't always have that."
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20150730/TECHNOLOGY/150739990/this-new-entrant-into-the-fast-growing-food-delivery-business-actually-hires-its-own-couriers
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