The $188,000 Question: What Javi's Tacos Learned About Delivery Apps

The $188,000 question

Javier Trujillo owns five restaurants in Omaha, Nebraska: Javi’s Tacos, Time to Rise and Shine, Frosty Mug, Helados Locos and El Milagro. Earlier this year he did something most restaurant owners avoid. He added up exactly what delivery apps were costing him.

The number was $188,000. That wasn’t food cost or marketing spend. It was commission, paid to DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats over a single year for listing his own menus on their platforms.

Do you know the same number for your restaurant?

What $188,000 actually bought

Trujillo put it plainly to WOWT, the Omaha TV station that reported the story: “Any service that we use that does delivery and then pushes our menu to their customers, we have paid $188,000 last year.”

That figure doesn’t include rent, payroll or the cost of tortillas and carne asada. It’s commission: typically 20 to 30 percent of every ticket, taken off the top before the restaurant pays for a single ingredient.

Commission wasn’t the only cost either. Trujillo described orders that were accepted and cooked, and then never collected because there weren’t enough drivers nearby. “That’s losses on us,” he said. He paid for the food and never got the sale.

For a group with a well-known local brand, a large share of app orders comes from guests who already know the restaurant and would have ordered anyway. Trujillo was counting on that: “I think we have a strong enough brand that people, if they want to order, they can order directly from our website.”

He turned the apps off

In April 2026, Trujillo stopped using third-party delivery apps across all five restaurants. He said the change meant he didn’t have to cut staff to cover the delivery fees.

Guests can still get his food delivered. They order through the restaurants’ own website and Toast ordering instead of a marketplace, and a delivery service can still carry the order without taking a commission on it. The 20 to 30 percent now stays in the restaurant, and so does the order itself, with the guest’s name, number and order history.

UK rates are in the same range if you want to run the same sums: Uber Eats charges 30% when it delivers, and the full breakdown is in what UK restaurants pay in delivery app commission. On £10,000 of app orders a month, 30% is £36,000 a year.

Every app order is a guest you don’t own

This is easy to miss while you’re busy keeping the kitchen running. A delivery app takes the relationship as well as a cut of the ticket.

The guest’s phone number, their order history, whether they’re a regular or a one-off: all of it sits in the app’s database rather than yours. So your next move, whether it’s a win-back text, a loyalty reward or a simple “we miss you”, isn’t yours to make. You’re paying for access to customers you already had, and you can’t speak to them without paying again.

We’ve written about why owning your guest data matters more than any single campaign. The Javi’s Tacos story puts a price on that argument.

The channel that charges no commission at all

Third-party delivery is where you pay the most and own the least. Prepaid gift cards and vouchers are the opposite: no commission, nobody standing between you and the guest, and the money lands in your account before you cook anything.

Someone buys a $50 (or £50) card from your own website in November. You keep all of it, because nobody sits in the middle of the sale. You hold that cash for weeks or months before buying a single ingredient against it, the reverse of every other sale in the building. And when it’s redeemed, most people spend past the card’s value, so the card sets a minimum for the ticket rather than a limit.

Ownership links straight back to the $188,000. A gift card sale gives you two guest records: the buyer and the recipient. Someone who already loves your restaurant is paying you to introduce it to someone new, and both of them land in your database with the occasion attached, whether a birthday, an anniversary or a thank-you.

Running it properly takes dedicated software rather than a page on your website and a spreadsheet: a branded purchase page on your own domain, instant email delivery for 11pm Christmas Eve buyers, quick redemption on the floor, reporting on outstanding voucher value, and full export of buyer and recipient records. VoucherCart is one established platform built specifically for this, with eVouchers, reloadable and printed cards, a redemption app and POS, PMS and CRM integrations. Your POS provider may also offer a gift card module, so price the two against each other.

Whichever you choose, check two things before signing: whether you can set your own expiry terms, and whether you can export buyer and recipient records whenever you want. A voucher tool that holds onto the guest data is just an aggregator with better branding. Our guide to restaurant gift cards covers the margin, the VAT rules and the timing in full.

Know what the apps really cost you

Apps can still earn their place, especially for reaching guests who have never heard of you. What matters is knowing what they cost you, both in commission and in control of your own guest list.

Pull twelve months of statements and add up the commission lines. Then add the promotions you funded, the refunds and the orders nobody collected, and put the total next to your net profit for the year. If the first number is uncomfortably close to the second, or bigger, you have your own version of Trujillo’s $188,000 question. Reducing delivery app commission starts with moving your regulars to direct ordering, one receipt and one packaging insert at a time.

Growtality helps restaurants keep more of what they earn, and own the guest relationships that bring the next order.