Restaurants Reclaim Menu Ownership
Chris Webb, CEO of ChowNow, on the new restaurant stack
The real issue is control, not just commission. If a restaurant has to keep one marketplace menu, it cannot cleanly separate higher third party pricing from lower direct or in store pricing. That turns the menu into a strategic bottleneck. Restaurants either absorb DoorDash and Uber Eats fees in already thin margins, or show marked up prices that make direct guests feel overcharged, which is why direct ordering software became an important part of the restaurant stack.
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In practice, many restaurants mark up aggregator prices to offset commissions that can reach roughly 30%. But if the same system menu also powers pickup or direct ordering, that markup leaks into channels where the restaurant wanted to keep prices lower and margins higher.
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That is the opening for companies like ChowNow, Lunchbox, Owner, and Olo. They let restaurants run first party ordering on their own site or app, keep customer data, and use DoorDash Drive or similar courier APIs just for delivery, instead of handing over discovery, checkout, and economics to the marketplace.
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Uber Eats now explicitly supports separate prices for different order types in parts of its menu tooling. That shows where the market is heading. More flexible menu infrastructure is becoming a competitive feature because restaurants want different prices for delivery, pickup, and direct web orders.
The next phase of restaurant software will center on who owns the menu, the checkout, and the customer record. Delivery networks will keep supplying drivers, but more restaurants will treat them as background logistics providers while keeping pricing, promotion, and repeat ordering in their own stack.