AI food delivery has its first real test case, and it is a very small company. Bites, a 10-person startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, lets diners order from restaurants inside ChatGPT at the same prices they would pay at the counter, plus a flat $1 fee. The order goes straight to the restaurant’s own till system, not through a delivery marketplace.
The Verge’s Mia Sato reported on 7 October 2026 that DoorDash noticed. In August, a number of Bay Area restaurants received an email from DoorDash warning that they might be listed on Bites without their consent, and that, depending on the state, “such practices could be illegal”.
This guide explains how the Bites model works, what the price gap looks like in a real order, and why the warning letter matters. It also covers the court ruling on customer data, how DoorDash is building its own AI ordering tools, and what AI food delivery could mean for restaurants, including in the UK.
Table of contents
- What Bites Is and How AI Food Delivery Works Inside ChatGPT
- The DoorDash Letter and What It Signals About AI Food Delivery
- The Price Gap in AI Food Delivery: One Test Order
- One Restaurateur’s AI Food Delivery Numbers
- Who Owns the Customer in AI Food Delivery
- The DoorDash Problem: When Agents Replace Apps
- How DoorDash Is Building Its Own AI Food Delivery Tools
- What AI Food Delivery Could Mean for Restaurants
- What to Watch Next in AI Food Delivery
- Frequently Asked Questions
- References and Further Reading
What Bites Is and How AI Food Delivery Works Inside ChatGPT
Bites was founded in 2024 by Bala Subramaniam, its chief executive, who previously worked at Instacart, and Deepak Tirumalasetty. The Verge reports that Matt Maloney, who co-founded Grubhub and left it in 2021 after its sale, is also a Bites co-founder. His role had not been reported before.
Bites has a normal app, but it describes itself as “AI native”, and its AI food delivery service is built around assistants. Diners can find a Bites restaurant and place an order directly in ChatGPT. The company’s own announcement in May 2026 said its ordering also works in Claude and other assistants.
A $1 fee instead of a commission
The core of the Bites AI food delivery pitch is price. Bites charges a flat $1 surcharge per order instead of a percentage commission. Diners usually pay that $1, although some restaurants cover it for their customers. Bites says restaurants then have no reason to mark up their delivery menus, so diners see in-store prices.
Bites’ website gives its own example of the markup it wants to remove: a “$17 salad becomes $23 on delivery apps”. That is a 35% mark-up, worked out as $6 divided by $17. The company also says 100% of delivery fees go to drivers.
Orders go straight to the point-of-sale system
This AI food delivery model works through restaurant point-of-sale (POS) companies such as Toast and Square, which already process restaurant orders. Bites pulls the digital menu from the POS into the AI assistant, builds the basket from what the diner asks for, takes payment, and sends the order straight into the restaurant’s system.
Once a POS company has partnered with Bites, a restaurant clicks a button to opt in. In May 2026, Bites announced a partnership with Stream, a menu and order integration company, which it said makes AI ordering “operationally simple for >30k restaurants”. That is the size of the network Stream connects to, not the number of restaurants on Bites.
How big Bites really is
How big this AI food delivery startup is depends on who is counting. The Verge describes Bites as a pre-seed startup with “just around 300 restaurants signed up in the Bay Area”. In April, Bites told Food On Demand it had more than 1,000 restaurant locations, mostly in Greater San Francisco, and more than 1 million completed orders. Locations and restaurants are not the same measure, so the two figures may both be accurate.
| Feature | Bites | DoorDash marketplace |
|---|---|---|
| What the restaurant pays | No commission; a $1 flat fee per order, usually paid by the diner | 15%, 25% or 30% of the delivery subtotal, or 6% on pickup |
| Menu prices | In-store prices, no markups | Restaurants may set separate delivery prices |
| Where you order | Bites app, or inside ChatGPT and other assistants | DoorDash app and website |
| Where the order goes | Straight into the restaurant’s POS | Through DoorDash’s platform |
| Customer data | Restaurant keeps the guest record | Usually first name, last initial and the order |
| Discovery and ads | Not the focus; built for diners who know where to eat | Sponsored listings and promotions |
The DoorDash Letter and What It Signals About AI Food Delivery
DoorDash processed 970 million orders in the second quarter of 2026. Bites is a blip next to that. So the most telling part of the Verge story is not the startup’s size but the fact that the market leader wrote to restaurants about a tiny AI food delivery rival.
What the email said
According to copies seen by The Verge, the form letter said DoorDash had heard from “several partners” who had been added to Bites without their knowledge. It warned that they may not have agreed to Bites’ “terms, pricing structures, or service standards”. It also said they may not control the accuracy of their menu or opening hours there, and that “such practices could be illegal”. It included instructions for asking Bites to remove a listing.
DoorDash spokesperson Lisa Singh told The Verge that “some restaurant partners raised concerns” about appearing on Bites without consent. “The information shared with partners made clear that no action was needed if they had opted in,” she said. DoorDash did not answer the Verge’s questions on pricing, data sharing or how AI might disrupt app-based ordering.
How Bites answered
Subramaniam told The Verge that 14 restaurant partners had received the DoorDash letter. A handful of restaurants that were not on Bites asked to join after learning about it from the email. Bites also admitted that some restaurants asked to be removed, and said those listings came from old demos. Other restaurants received the email without being listed at all. Bites says restaurants normally join its AI food delivery network through their POS provider, with a one-click opt-in.
The listing-consent rules behind the warning
DoorDash’s “depending on the state” line points at laws like California’s AB 2149, the Fair Food Delivery Act of 2020. Signed on 24 September 2020 and in force from 1 January 2021, it says a food delivery platform “shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement” that expressly authorises it.
There is some irony here. The Assembly committee analysis of that bill cited earlier disputes in which platforms delivered from restaurants without permission. They included In-N-Out Burger’s 2015 lawsuit against DoorDash, and a 2020 Verge report on Grubhub listing restaurants that had not agreed. Whether the law reaches an AI food delivery layer that runs through a restaurant’s own POS has not been tested in court.
The Price Gap in AI Food Delivery: One Test Order
The clearest evidence for AI food delivery in the Verge piece is a receipt. The Verge ordered a pizza and a drink for delivery through ChatGPT using the Bites plug-in. Including tip, tax and delivery fees, it came to $56.73. The same order on DoorDash came to $70.29, with higher service fees and the same pizza priced $11 higher.
The gap is $13.56, which is $70.29 minus $56.73. Put another way, the AI food delivery order cost 19% less, or the DoorDash order cost 24% more. The bars are scaled to the DoorDash total.
Why the menu prices differ
The pizza price gap between AI food delivery and the app comes from how restaurants recover marketplace fees. DoorDash’s merchant pricing page lists three delivery plans: Basic at 15%, Plus at 25% and Premier at 30% of the order subtotal, with pickup at 6% on every plan. Higher tiers reach more customers and add benefits such as DashPass access. DoorDash’s own fee FAQ is open about the result: “you can set different prices for delivery orders if you want. Many restaurants do.”
The commission on a typical order
DoorDash’s Q2 figures give an average order value of about $34, which is $33.1 billion of marketplace gross order value divided by 970 million orders. The chart below uses a round $40 food subtotal to show what each model takes. It compares the restaurant’s commission with Bites’ flat fee, which the diner usually pays.
Each DoorDash figure is $40 multiplied by the plan’s published rate. The commission covers listing, marketing, driver logistics, support and card processing, so it is not pure margin. An AI food delivery service like Bites still has to pay for payments and delivery from its own fees, and the delivery fee is separate in both models.
One Restaurateur's AI Food Delivery Numbers
The Verge spoke to Jay Jayaraman, who has 13 restaurants listed on Bites and calls himself an early adopter of the platform. That makes him a useful AI food delivery case study. Before Bites, he estimates that 80% of his delivery orders came from DoorDash. Now about 65% come through Bites and 25% from DoorDash, with the remaining sliver from Uber Eats and Grubhub.
The 10% is what remains after 65% and 25%. These are one operator’s estimates, not audited figures, and they do not say whether his total order volume rose or fell.
Why the margin moved
Jayaraman says his margins are higher on Bites orders than on DoorDash orders. “We are seeing a huge drop or a huge shift away from DoorDash, which I personally welcome because it’s adding to my bottom line,” he told The Verge. He has not yet switched on ChatGPT ordering itself. He wants a live demo from Bites first.
Why he is staying on DoorDash anyway
Even as his DoorDash share shrinks, Jayaraman plans to stay on the platform to serve the customers who order there. That is the realistic picture of AI food delivery today. It is likely to sit beside the marketplaces as another channel, not replace them overnight. He did not reply to DoorDash’s email. “I was very happy when I received the letter, because DoorDash is feeling the pain,” he said.
Who Owns the Customer in AI Food Delivery
The second big complaint restaurants have about delivery apps is data, and it is where AI food delivery could change the most. Platforms like DoorDash typically share only a customer’s first name, last initial and what they ordered. Jayaraman says he gets “absolutely nothing” from DoorDash on customer data. With Bites, orders and contact details come straight to him, so he can contact customers directly.
What New York City tried
New York City passed a law in 2021 to force the issue. Its Customer Data Law required platforms, on a restaurant’s request, to hand over each customer’s full name, phone number, email address, delivery address and order contents. Platforms had to send it monthly in a machine-readable format. Every customer was “presumed to have consented” unless they opted out, order by order.
What the court decided
DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats sued. On 5 August 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that the law violates the First Amendment. Judges Wesley, Carney and Park applied the intermediate scrutiny test for commercial speech and found the law went further than needed. “The result is a marketing list that no customer asked to join and that none can be confident they have permanently left,” the court wrote.
The judges pointed to an obvious alternative: an opt-in. They noted that Uber Eats already shares customer data with restaurants under some agreements, but only when customers opt in.
Why direct ordering sidesteps the fight
The ruling means a city cannot simply order platforms to pass on customer lists in that form. Direct AI food delivery avoids the question, because the restaurant collects the details itself as the seller. That is why Bites leads with the line “Diner belongs to the restaurant” on its homepage. For restaurants, data ownership may matter more than the $1 fee in the long run.
| Customer detail | Usually shared by marketplaces | NYC law would have required | Direct order via Bites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | First name and last initial | Yes | Yes |
| Phone and email | No | Yes | Yes |
| Delivery address | No | Yes | Yes |
| Order contents | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Status today | Standard practice | Struck down, 5 August 2026 | Restaurant collects it as the seller |
The DoorDash Problem: When Agents Replace Apps
The Verge has coined a name for the wider fight: “the DoorDash problem”. Tech companies promise that AI agents will do tasks for us, from booking meetings to ordering dinner. If billions of people start using the web through assistants built on a large language model instead of apps and websites, those services lose direct contact with their customers.
Ads and boosted listings are at stake
Marketplaces earn far more than commission. DoorDash’s ads business reached $1 billion in 2024, according to The Verge. Amazon’s ad business brought in $19.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026, driven by sponsored product listings. An agent that orders on your behalf never sees a sponsored listing or a “try DashPass free” banner, and it is less likely to add the bottle of wine the app would suggest.
Platforms are already pushing back on agents
That is why the big platforms are wary. Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 to stop its Comet browser agent shopping on Amazon. Amazon has since stopped Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on its site, and many sites now face the question of whether to let AI agents in at all. Bites’ version of AI food delivery is unusual because it does not scrape a marketplace. It connects the assistant straight to the restaurant.
Discovery is the open question
The biggest thing marketplaces offer restaurants is discovery: being found by people who did not know them. Subramaniam concedes Bites is built for diners who already know where they want to eat. “It may not become the discovery platform,” he said. “We don’t need to have sponsored ads … but if you know where you want to eat, we will get you to the place.” Who sells discovery inside AI food delivery is still unclear.
How DoorDash Is Building Its Own AI Food Delivery Tools
DoorDash is not standing still on AI food delivery. Its Q2 2026 letter to shareholders says it has stepped up AI product work and recently launched Ask, an AI assistant that helps customers discover restaurants and build grocery baskets. In September it unveiled an AI agent you can text to order food in Apple’s Messages, using prompts like “reorder my usual”.
Inside ChatGPT, but checkout stays home
DoorDash is also inside ChatGPT. In December 2025 it launched a grocery shopping app there that turns recipes into a shopping list from stores such as Kroger and Safeway. At checkout, users are sent to DoorDash’s own app to finish the order. That keeps the payment, the account and the upsell with DoorDash. Bites’ AI food delivery flow takes the payment inside the conversation and passes the order to the restaurant.
The agent problem for DoorDash’s own model
Even DoorDash’s own agents raise an awkward question, as The Verge points out. If an agent reorders your usual dinner, what does a restaurant get for paying to boost its listing in the app? Natural language processing makes “the usual” easy to understand. It does not make a sponsored listing any more visible.
The scale gap
For now, the incumbents are vastly bigger than any AI food delivery startup. The table below sets out DoorDash’s latest quarter against what is known about Bites.
| Measure | DoorDash, Q2 2026 | Bites |
|---|---|---|
| Orders | 970 million in the quarter, up 27% (17% excluding Deliveroo) | More than 1 million in total, as of April 2026 |
| Order value | $33.1 billion marketplace gross order value | Not disclosed |
| Revenue | $4.45 billion, 13.5% of order value | Not disclosed; $1 per order |
| Profit | $200 million net income; $914 million adjusted EBITDA | Pre-seed startup |
| Restaurants | National and international, incl. Deliveroo and Wolt | About 300 in the Bay Area (The Verge) |
| Team | Global company | 10 people |
Bites’ lifetime total of about 1 million orders is roughly 0.1% of the orders DoorDash handled in three months, which is 1 million divided by 970 million.
What AI Food Delivery Could Mean for Restaurants
For restaurant owners, the lesson is not that they should leave the marketplaces. It is that AI food delivery creates a new channel with different economics, and it is worth testing on their own terms. Our guide to restaurant management software covers the POS and ordering systems these channels plug into.
Questions to ask before switching on an AI channel
Start with control. Who keeps the menu, prices and opening hours accurate inside the assistant? Who handles a refund when food arrives cold? Does the customer record land in your systems, and can you use it for loyalty offers? Which delivery drivers carry the order, and who answers for them? DoorDash’s letter raised exactly these issues, and they apply to any new ordering layer.
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Written consent to be listed | Laws such as California’s AB 2149 require an agreement before a platform arranges delivery |
| Menu and hours sync | An assistant quoting the wrong price or hours damages trust in the restaurant, not the app |
| Total fees per order | Compare commission, flat fees, payment processing and delivery costs on a real basket |
| Customer data and consent | Owning the guest record only helps if diners have agreed to hear from you |
| Support and refunds | Someone must own complaints when no marketplace sits in the middle |
The UK picture
Bites operates only in the US for now. But the question reaches the UK through DoorDash itself, which agreed in May 2025 to buy London-based Deliveroo in a deal valuing it at about £2.9 billion, and now reports Deliveroo inside its results. UK restaurants on Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats face the same commission trade-offs if AI food delivery arrives here. UK data protection law also sets its own rules on passing diners’ contact details between businesses.
Plan before the agents arrive
The practical step is to make your menu, prices and stock data clean and machine-readable now, because every AI food delivery channel depends on it. A clear AI strategy helps decide which assistants to support and which customer data to keep. Delivery apps are also adding AI of their own, as Shipt did with its AI shopping assistant.
What to Watch Next in AI Food Delivery
Three things will show whether AI food delivery becomes a real threat to the marketplaces or stays a niche.
Restaurant uptake
Watch whether operators like Jayaraman actually switch on AI food delivery inside assistants, and whether more POS companies join. The Stream partnership gives Bites a route to tens of thousands of restaurants, but a route is not a signed-up restaurant.
The assistants’ own rules
ChatGPT and other assistants decide which apps appear and how checkout works. If they start selling placement, discovery returns as a paid product, just inside a chat window.
The marketplaces’ response
DoorDash has shown it will contest listings and build its own agents. Further letters, legal challenges or fee changes would show how seriously it takes the threat.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Bites?
Bites is an AI food delivery start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area that lets diners order from restaurants in its app or inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT. It charges a flat $1 fee per order instead of a commission.
Can you order restaurant food in ChatGPT?
Yes, in some places. Bites works inside ChatGPT for its partner restaurants. DoorDash’s ChatGPT app covers grocery shopping and sends you to the DoorDash app to pay.
Why did DoorDash email restaurants about Bites?
DoorDash said some partners had complained about appearing on Bites without consent. The email warned the practice could be illegal in some states and explained how to request removal.
Do delivery apps share customer details with restaurants?
Usually only a first name, last initial and the order. A New York City law requiring fuller sharing was struck down by a federal appeals court on 5 August 2026.
Is Bites available in the UK?
Not yet. Bites describes its goal as a nationwide US network and has not announced a UK launch. DoorDash, which now owns Deliveroo, is building AI ordering tools of its own.
References and Further Reading
AI could upend food delivery (The Verge)
DoorDash Q2 2026 financial results and shareholder letter (SEC filing)
DoorDash commission rates and pricing (DoorDash for Merchants)
DoorDash, Inc. v. City of New York, No. 25-81 (US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit)
Bites: food delivery at dine-in prices (Bites)
Bites announces Stream partnership (Bites)
Bites launches on ChatGPT (PR Newswire)
Bites CEO calls third-party delivery broken (Food On Demand)
AB 2149 committee analysis (California Assembly)
New law requires delivery platforms to partner with restaurants directly (ABC7)
Prompt to purchase: DoorDash brings grocery shopping to ChatGPT (Internet Retailing)
Amazon and Perplexity have kicked off the great AI web browser fight (The Verge)
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