By Won Jung
Few things in life are worse than an unsatisfied food craving. Sometimes, you don’t want to leave your house, but the taste you long for comes only from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver. Or maybe you want to enjoy a meal in the comfort of your own home, without the added expense of eating out.
Luckily for diners, DoorDash is here to save the day.
DoorDash recently expanded its on-demand delivery platform that connects restaurants with customers to Nassau County. A relatively young company, DoorDash was founded in the summer of 2013, but has exploded onto the scene and now has a presence in more than 40 markets across the United States and Canada. The California-headquartered business acts as a middle person between restaurant and consumer by coordinating delivery for a fee ranging from $0.99 to $4.99.
DoorDash has been operating in the New York City area for two years but decided to expand into neighboring suburban counties to meet a growing demand for its service.
“We have a lot of great restaurant relationships in [Long Island] as well as a lot of demand from our customers, especially people who are commuting into New York from Long Island,” Brent Seals, general manager of DoorDash, said. “We’re really excited to be able to provide that service that they’re used to [in New York City] back at home.”
The DoorDash team prepped for quite a while prior to this expansion to bring in partner restaurants. The innovative business had teams on the ground for two months leading up to the Long Island launch.
DoorDash has also worked to recruit interested delivery drivers, affectionately known as “dashers” in company lingo. In the same way that it works hard to cultivate a good relationship with its partner restaurants, DoorDash is committed to keeping its dashers happy while maximizing efficiency.
“All of our drivers are independent contractors, and they can log into their app and choose where and when they want to work to deliver food,” Seals explained.
For restaurants and drivers interested in working with DoorDash, a visit to www.doordash.com/merchant/apply and www.doordash.com/dasher/signup, respectively, is the first step to creating a partnership or finding a job.
On the consumer side, DoorDash has a mobile application for both Android and iOS users along with a website, www.doordash.com, that streamlines the ordering and delivery process. It’s through these platforms that DoorDash is able to showcase its extremely expansive selection of cuisines and restaurants.
“Being able to get all of those restaurants in one place is really why our customers come to us,” Seals said. “[We also work] on empowering restaurants that don’t offer delivery. Previously, you may have had to go in and pick up or you only had to eat in-house, but now you can get that on DoorDash, delivered to your door.”
Alongside local partnerships that the company has fostered with restaurants such as City Cellar, Old Westbury Diner, Pollos El Paisa and Punta Cana Dominican Grill, DoorDash also boasts relationships with larger, chain restaurants such as The Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang’s and Buffalo Wild Wings, among others. With this mix of local and national choices that runs the gamut of culinary experience, DoorDash offers its users a vast selection of food at their disposal.
And while the launch and beginning days of the company’s expansion into Nassau have been successful, their plans to connect restaurants and diners are nowhere near complete.
“We’re very excited about the greater New York area as a whole, so continuing into Suffolk County, the rest of Nassau County that we don’t quite cover and up north into Westchester County,” Seals said on DoorDash’s future plans. “We really want to expand our footprint throughout the New York area to be able to provide great delivery to everyone in the tri-state area.”
