News

Jimmy John's CEO refuses to partner with UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub

February 7, 2019

Jimmy John's CEO James North has officially taken an anti-third-party delivery stance, telling FastCasual in an email Thursday that it would never authorize outside companies, including Uber Eats, DoorDash or Grubhub, to deliver its sandwiches.

"We are, faster, fresher, better value, and more consistent at delivery than the third-party services," he said. 

Jimmy John's, which opened in 1983, employs nearly 45,000 drivers at its nearly 3,000 units. For every store, Jimmy John's limits deliveries to locations no more than 5 minutes from its restaurants to make sure its sandwiches arrive as fast and as fresh as possible.

"It's great to get your favorite local restaurant delivered to your door, but at what cost? We want our customers to end up with a perfect sandwich, so we'll continue to hold ourselves accountable to our own high standards," he said. "We currently do it better than anyone else and we're going to continue to improve on that."

The announcement goes against an industry trend in which restaurants are increasingly adopting third-party delivery services, making it a $13 billion market with projections predicting a 13.5 percent annual growth rate. Taco Bell, for example, announced today that it was launching a nationwide partnership with Grubhub, and Chipotle launched delivery last year with DoorDash.

Despite the widespread adoption of third-party delivery services, research conducted by Service Management Group and a study commissioned by Jimmy John's and conducted by the Boston Consulting Group, found that customers have in fact become increasingly dissatisfied with third-party delivery services. The research found that:

• 35 percent of customers who have used third-party delivery services said they have experienced a problem with their deliveries.
• 76 percent hold the restaurant itself at least partially responsible for any errors. 
• 92 percent of customers expected their food deliveries within 15 to 30 minutes of placing an order, while the largest delivery services averaged 49-minute delivery times.

In addition to the announcement, Jimmy John's is launching a national marketing campaign that will include giant billboards highlighting the delivery promise and a video showcasing tweets from dissatisfied customers of third-party food delivery companies.