How Will the DoorDash and Instacart Deal Affect Your Local Restaurant?

DoorDash has agreed to acquire Instacart for roughly $17 billion. The companies plan to offer DashPass and Instacart+ for one membership fee, which could lower the bill for households paying for both. The direction is clear: the app that brings you dinner wants to bring you everything else, too.

For consumers, the appeal is easy to understand. Picture a weeknight. Work ran late, someone has homework, and the refrigerator contains three condiments and an ambitious bag of spinach. Delivery is not an indulgence. It’s the answer. For people who can’t easily leave home, it matters even more.

But behind the dinner arriving at your door is a restaurant trying to make the numbers work. And as the platform gets bigger, the restaurant’s share of the relationship can get smaller.

Earlier this month, in “The Uber ezCater Deal and the Fight for Your Customers,” I urged operators to use third-party platforms to grow while building direct relationships with their guests. I’m coming back to that message on purpose. Every merger makes the platform a bigger part of the customer’s day, and the question gets more urgent: how does a restaurant benefit from that reach without losing its own customers?

The $50 order that loses your restaurant money

Meet Dana. Not a real person, but every operator will recognize her. She owns a neighborhood restaurant that took her eight years and most of her savings to build.

It's 6:40 on a Friday. The dining room is full, the phone hasn't stopped, and the tablet by the pass chimes. A $50 DoorDash order: two entrées, two sides, a dessert. Dana feels the small lift every owner knows. Someone chose us tonight.

Her cooks fire it between dine-in tickets. A server double-checks the bag, adds extra napkins, tapes it shut. The driver is in and out in four minutes. On the dashboard, the night looks a little better: $50.

Now follow the money.

About $15 is the food itself: the protein, the produce, the good olive oil Dana refuses to downgrade. Another $15 pays the people who cooked, packed and checked it. A dollar goes to the containers and bag. Roughly $9 covers the rent, the power running the walk-in, the insurance and the software. Those bills arrive whether anyone orders or not.

That's $40 before the app takes anything.

Then it does. DoorDash's published Plus commission for restaurants with 75 or fewer locations is 25%, including delivery and payment processing. On a $50 order, that's $12.50.

Dana is now $2.50 underwater on an order her team handled perfectly.

There's one more cost. When orders dipped last spring, she started paying for Sponsored Listings to stay near the top of the app. Spread across her orders, that's about $2 for this one.

Final tally: Dana loses $4.50 on a $50 order. That's 9% of the sale, gone.

Nobody did anything wrong. The food was hot. The driver was on time. The family will probably leave five stars. The loss doesn’t show up as a moment during service. It shows up at the end of the month, when her bookkeeper asks why sales went up and the bank balance didn’t.

To be fair, these numbers are illustrative, not industry averages, and they count every cost. On a slow Tuesday, with staff already on the clock and the kitchen half idle, one more order can still help cover the rent. Advertising on the platform is optional, too, but optional rarely feels optional when you watch your listing slide down the screen the week you stop paying. And a business can’t run on spare capacity forever. Eventually, every order has to help pay every bill.

So, my advice is to judge marketplace orders by what’s left after commissions, advertising, and promotions - not by how many tickets reach the kitchen.

A good meal should begin a relationship

The $4.50 hurts. What hurts more is what Dana doesn’t get from that order.

The family loved the meal. They order again the next Friday, and the Friday after that. The platform did something genuinely valuable: it introduced them. But Dana still doesn’t know their names. She doesn’t know it was a birthday, or that one of them really means it about no cilantro. If something goes wrong with an order, she can’t call to make it right.

DoorDash provides marketplace sales insights, but its reporting guide lists customer contact reports for its direct Online Ordering product only. Knowing an order happened is different from having a direct, permission-based relationship with the person who placed it.

When every return visit begins inside someone else’s app, the restaurant slowly becomes a fulfillment center, and the app becomes the customer’s habit. For an owner who spent years building a team, a menu, and a welcome, that is more than a marketing concern. It’s the hospitality business she set out to build, quietly slipping out of her hands.

Fight for your customers, one interaction at a time

You don’t need to quit the marketplace or outspend a tech giant. Fight for your customers by making it easier for them to choose you again. Start with the guests already reaching you through your door, your website, and your phone.

• Order from your own website on your phone. Is the menu clear? Is checkout painless? If it frustrates you, it’s losing your guests.
• Answer every call and catering request. A guest trying to feed twenty colleagues shouldn’t need twenty follow-ups. Every missed call during the rush is a customer who may open an app instead.
• Invite guests to stay in touch, with permission. Remember preferences, follow up after a catering event, and make reordering simple.
• Choose technology that works for you, not around you. It should help your team do this consistently during service and let you keep the customer history you build.

Pick one of these this week. You already have something worth coming back for. Make coming back easier.

Diners have a choice too

Your guests aren't doing anything wrong by ordering through an app. Convenience matters to them, and a cheaper bundled subscription will make that app even easier to open. Most diners have no idea how much of their meal you actually keep. It isn't their job to know. It's your job to make the direct path the easy one.

So tell them, and make it worth their while. Put “order direct” on your bags, receipts, menus and Google listing. Check that your full checkout price holds up against the app's, fees included. Offer loyalty perks that only direct and pickup guests get. Ask your regulars how they like to order, and thank them by name when they come in.

Think about the family that orders from Dana every Friday. They would happily order from her directly. Someone just has to ask, and it has to be as easy as tapping the app.

A platform can make the introduction. Your job is to earn the relationship and give guests an easy way to keep it going. The best outcome isn't another completed delivery. It's a guest who chooses you by name, a team that recognizes them, and a restaurant that's still there next year.

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