The Rant
The real problem, in your own voice. Unfiltered, unpolished, and as heated as it actually was.
The Food Rant
The loudest voices in food have never worked in food.
This is where the people who actually do the work push back. Real problems, real numbers, and nothing we cannot prove.
What this is
A place to say what is really going on.
People who work in food send in what is actually happening to them. We publish it, with their name or without it.
Then we go find the real numbers behind it, and we show you where every one of them came from.
The Food Rant is a co-op. If what you do has anything to do with food, it is yours. We are done being talked about by people who have never done the work.
How a rant works
Every rant has three parts.
A complaint just sits there and rots. A rant with a second and third act is something somebody else can use on their worst day.
The Process
What you tried. What it cost. What blew up in your face along the way.
The Result
An honest ending. Fixed, still broken, or openly unfinished. All three count.
Anonymous or with your name on it, your call. We go after the practice, the platform and the system. Never another operator. They are in the trench with you.
The Receipts
Real numbers. Every one sourced.
Everybody has an opinion about this industry. Very few of them come with a source. These do, and every one links back to where it came from.
What delivery apps charge you
Thirty percent off the top. Your whole margin is five.
30%
Commission on a delivery order at the top published tier.
15%Basic plan
25%Plus plan
30%Premier plan
6%Pickup, all plans
5%Typical margin, pre-pandemic
This is not a leak and it is not an accusation. It is the published price list, sitting on the merchant site where anyone can read it.
Here is the part that matters. Before the pandemic, a typical independent restaurant kept about five cents of pre-tax profit on every dollar of sales. The top delivery tier takes thirty cents of that same dollar before food, labor or rent is paid.
The commission is six times the size of the margin this business was built on. And that was the good years. Last year 42 percent of operators said they were not profitable at all.
That is why a delivery order can look like a strong ticket and still lose money.
And the higher tiers buy visibility in the app, which means the operators who most need the orders are the ones paying the most to get them.
Sources: DoorDash published merchant pricing, merchants.doordash.com/en-us/pricing. Margin figure from the National Restaurant Association, July 8 2026, restaurant.org.
Do most places fail in year one?
Everybody told you ninety percent fail. The real number is twenty six.
26%
Close in year one, in a study that tracked 2,439 restaurants.
26%Year one
19%Year two
14%Year three
2,439Restaurants studied
You have heard it from a banker, a landlord, a relative at Thanksgiving. Ninety percent of restaurants fail in year one. There is no study anywhere that says so.
Over three years the real cumulative rate is 57 to 61 percent. The hospitality professor who ran the numbers says he found no evidence of a ninety percent rate anywhere in the literature, and calls it "a myth that is harmful to the restaurant industry."
Source: H.G. Parsa et al., Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio, 1996 to 1999, n=2,439. news.osu.edu
Why your costs exploded
You are not bad at this. The math moved under you.
42%
Of operators said their restaurant simply was not profitable last year.
+36%Total expenses since 2019
+41%Hourly wages
+35%Wholesale food
+36%Menu prices, 2020 to 2026
Here is why raising prices never felt like getting ahead. Menu prices went up 36 percent. Total expenses went up 36 percent. You ran to stand still.
A typical independent restaurant ran about a five percent pre-tax margin before the pandemic. To simply break even against today's costs, the association's own modeling says you need sales roughly 29 percent above 2019. To get that five percent back, you need 36 percent.
Source: National Restaurant Association, July 8 2026. restaurant.org
Topics
What people are ranting about.
These are the ones that keep coming up. Pick the one that is yours, or send something nobody here has raised yet.
Third party commissions
Vendor price increases
Influencers at the door
Behind the bar
Rent and lease renewals
Credit card fees
No shows and reservations
Hiring and turnover
Opening year one
Tipping and service charges
Health inspections
Insurance renewals
POS and tech fees
Permits and licensing
Online reviews
Food waste
Scheduling
Closing a place down
Something else entirely
The show
The podcast, in production.
The best submissions become episodes. People who are actually in it, and the same three acts on camera.
Episodes and clips will live right here, attached to the rant that started them.
In production
The show is being built now with a Las Vegas production partner. There are no episodes yet, and we are not going to fake one.
The line we hold
Accurate. And unafraid.
We are not here to be balanced. We are here to be right. Right is the one thing they cannot argue with.
- We come after the practice, the platform and the system. Never another operator by name.
- Every number we publish links to its source. Usually theirs.
- Nothing fabricated. Not a rant, not a statistic, not a quote.
- Anonymous or named is your call, and it changes nothing about whether we run you.
- We are not careful. We are accurate. Those are not the same thing.
- When we get it wrong we say so in public.
Send us yours.
Bring the problem. Somebody here has already hit it, tried something, and knows how it turned out. No owner has every answer. That is what the table is for.