Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
GrubHub has come under intense scrutiny of late for what critics and some restaurant owners say are exploitative fees made only worse during the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a revealing BuzzFeed News story has shed light on another controversial yet longtime practice around phone ordering.
The company, which also owns the Seamless and Eat24 services and is the largest food ordering platform in the US, uses an assortment of fees to collect revenue from restaurants, ranging from fees for marketing to various commissions on orders made through the web and its app.
But as BuzzFeed points out, a lesser known method GrubHub uses to extract money from small businesses involves putting its own custom phone number on business pages that redirects…