Seattle restaurant owner launches own delivery service with flat $10 fee, Uttam Mukherjee's delivery revenue halved when the city's PayUp courier mandate took effect, food that costs $10-15 in his restaurant sells for $40 on the apps

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Seattle restaurant owner launches own delivery service fox13seattle.com

fox13seattle.com

Spice Waala, an Indian street-food restaurant in Seattle, is done with DoorDash, Uber Eats, Caviar, Postmates and Grubhub. Owner Uttam Mukherjee is launching his own delivery service, Yaku, with a flat $10 delivery fee, employee drivers and a deliberately small map: five restaurants in the Ballard neighborhood to start, among them Ballard Pizza Company and Rachel's Bagels & Burritos, with more signing up this week.

The trigger was Seattle's PayUp ordinance, the minimum-pay requirement for app-based delivery workers that took effect in 2024. Mukherjee says revenue from the delivery companies fell 50 percent the moment it did. The platforms, carrying a new cost floor, repriced the order: food that costs $10-15 in the restaurant now costs $40 through the apps. "It just doesn't make sense — our food is not worth forty dollars," he told FOX 13 Seattle.

His answer is to internalize what the platforms charge for. Yaku's drivers are employees, paid to be available for four- or eight-hour shifts rather than per delivery — the restaurant now carries the cost of idle time itself, which is precisely the cost the apps' per-order model exists to push elsewhere. The neighborhood limit is what makes the flat fee possible: customers in Ballard see only Ballard restaurants, and the same rule will govern every new neighborhood Yaku opens.

The mandate's second order is already showing. A pay floor written for couriers on the apps has pushed at least one restaurant off the apps entirely; if others follow, the orders the law was meant to make more valuable will arrive in the hands of restaurant employees instead, at shift wages rather than per-drop rates. Whether five restaurants can sustain a dispatch operation is the bet Mukherjee is signing his name to this week.

The name is a reference to yaks. "Yaks are known to be good delivery animals," Mukherjee said.