28% Of Delivery Drivers Are Tasting Your Food Before You Get It

Thanks, US Foods, now we’ll never trust delivery drivers again

Ordering food to be delivered to your door with just a few taps on a smartphone screen is one of the few simple joys we get, living in the hellscape that is 2019 America. If you, like me, treat it as basically a sacred ritual to order in Mexican food and margs for your weekly Bachelorette viewing party (or whatever show floats your boat, obviously no judgment here), you may want to stop reading now, before your relationship with delivery drivers is forever changed for the worse.

Spoiler alert:

US Foods wanted to study the growing trend of app-based food delivery, so they surveyed a few thousand people about their food-ordering habits. They found that in every age group surveyed, delivery is on the rise, and expected to keep growing — 4 percent every year for the foreseeable future. Considering the convenience of apps like UberEats, Postmates, and GrubHub, that’s not surprising.

Here’s what is surprising (and disgusting). The survey included 497 people who were current or former drivers for at least one delivery app. And of those 497 current and former delivery drivers, 28 percent admitted to tasting the food before they delivered it to their customers.

That means, based on just simple math, one in four meals you order from an app is likely to have been sampled by the driver. This survey didn’t go into detail so we don’t know exactly what this means. I can report that I’ve never received a burrito with a bite taken out of it. But the fact that I now know a driver’s grubby fingers may have been all up in my tater tots is something I may never get over.

Like, who knows where those hands have been? Or when they were last sanitized? Keep em out of my chips, bro!

Anyway, sorry to be the bearer of this terrible news. If your stomach is turning at the idea of ever ordering in dinner again, at least know you’re not alone.

Guess we’ll be showering and putting on bras and pants and leaving the house for our meals. This is a travesty, and I would like to speak to the manager of Earth.

Gone are the days when all we had to worry about were simple problems of the past. You know, problems like the delivery driver dunking his balls in our side cup of salsa. Or a creepy driver using the app to get our numbers and then sending us gross texts. You know what, on second thought, having drivers who just snack on a fry or two doesn’t seem so bad anymore. If we gotta pay a fry tax to avoid having ball-dipping or creepy texting drivers, fine. Now back to pants-free TV watching while I await my (hopefully untouched) lunch.