Bites Takes Food Orders Away From DoorDash via ChatGPT

Bites lets diners order food from restaurants directly through ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI chatbot. The plugin sends the order straight to the restaurant. It skips delivery services like DoorDash entirely. The startup was founded by Bala Subramaniam, who previously worked at Instacart, the grocery delivery app. The co-founder is Matt Maloney, a co-founder of Grubhub, the food delivery service. Bites charges a flat $1 fee per order instead of DoorDash's commission, which runs as high as 30 percent. At one early partner, a chain of thirteen restaurants, the share of orders coming through Bites grew to 65 percent. DoorDash's share there dropped to 25 percent. The remaining 10 percent went to other platforms.

A restaurant paying DoorDash up to 30 percent per order has less freedom to set its own prices. Bites's flat fee leaves more margin instead. Bites says this lets partners keep menu prices lower rather than raise them to cover commissions. The Verge checked this directly. The same pizza order cost $56.73 through Bites versus $70.29 on DoorDash. This looks like a case where an AI agent cuts out the middleman between the customer and the restaurant's register. But Bites is still just ten people and about three hundred restaurants in a single city. That is a small base next to DoorDash's hundreds of millions of orders per quarter, so conclusions at that scale are premature for now.