A local alternative: How Nosh Haven is providing restaurants and customers community-focused food

Finn Yaeger was raised in a restaurant. His family owned a small Italian restaurant where he helped out in the kitchen as young as 7 years old.

Throughout college, restaurants continued to be a pivotal part of his life. He worked in restaurants and eventually ran some. At the end of college he didn’t know what was next, but he saw delivery apps like DoorDash and GrubHub changing the industry, and he wanted to be a part of it — sort of.

“When you get delivery now with these other companies, you're expecting cold and late food, you're expecting to be missing things,” Yaeger said of the food delivery giants.

If he was going to dive into the food delivery industry, it wasn’t going to be as a GrubHub driver or a DoorDash investor. He was looking for an alternative.

Yaeger heard about a group of restaurant owners in Old Saybrook who were pooling their resources to create an independent delivery company, Shoreline Menus, that would serve their businesses. They created a platform and devised the technology to run a local version of DoorDash that Yaeger hoped could be applied to New Haven, where he lives.

Nosh Haven was born. Restaurants in New Haven can join the platform, which functions logistically like DoorDash, but has an entirely different mission.

“We don't even see ourselves as a third party,” Yaeger said. “We do right by them; we do the delivery the way they want.”

Part of the inspiration for Nosh Haven was a frustration with some of the shortcomings with the major food delivery services, Yaeger said. He heard restaurant owners frustrated with bad service from the apps that reflected poorly on their business.

“We're not here to really make a killing, make money,” Yaeger said. “We're trying to change delivery and we're really here and looking for other ways on how to use delivery to help these independent restaurants.”

As of March there were 55 restaurants partnered with Nosh Haven, but Yaeger said that number is growing all the time.

Restaurants who partner with companies like DoorDash lose a large portion, about 30%, of their profit on a sale to the app. Nosh Haven charges about 15%, but for many restaurants it’s even less.

Hazel Lebron is the co-owner of Madeline’s Empanaderia in New Haven. Her husband, Maurice, is the executive chef and she runs the back end of things — marketing, branding and partnerships like the one the restaurant has with Nosh Haven. She discovered Nosh Haven while scrolling through Instagram.

The restaurant, which serves two dozen different types of empanadas as well as a variety of small plates, uses UberEats, GrubHub, DoorDash and Nosh Haven for delivery. But each time someone orders with one of the big names, Lebron slips a Nosh Haven business card and flier inside the order in hopes the customer will use that service next time.

“Because the truth is, [DoorDash, GrubHub and UberEats] are not about the business,” Lebron said. “They're not about the customer either. It's not like they even have a side that they really catered to.”

Her experience with Nosh Haven has been much more positive. Not only does the company take a nonexistent cut from each sale, but the service has been more prompt. Lebron also said she appreciates how the business is local and not corporate-based.

“It's local and it's community,” Lebron said. “And that's huge for me. So it made me want to be part of it even more.”

One aspect of the major food delivery apps that labor rights activists have taken issue with is the compensation and treatment of the gig workforce who deliver the food. Yaeger said that while his drivers work on a “gig” basis, he tried to address many of the problems with the other model.

“We hire like you’d hire a server in a bar or restaurant,” Yaeger said.

Unlike the major apps, drivers are vetted and interviewed. Their wages are monitored to ensure that at the end of the day they are making a fair average hourly wage.

“Say Johnny has three smaller tips, then we'll look for what's happening in the next hour. Because we get advance orders, we'll get larger advance orders, or we'll make sure he's in the area to get that order,” Yaeger explained.

If you’re in the New Haven area and find yourself craving a cajun chicken empanada with a cheddar cheese blend and mango habanero sauce, Madeline’s has an option for you — the Sweet Flame empanada. But when ordering, Lebron urges you to order directly through the restaurant or through Nosh Haven if you want to do right by “mom and pop” restaurants like hers.

“Some people order DoorDash and they come in and pick up their own DoorDash order,” Lebron said. “And I'm like, ‘Do you not realize that they are still charging us 25%? Sometimes it might be 12%. But still, just because you ordered through that system it's charging us. And I wish it wasn't that way.”

To order with Nosh Haven, visit https://noshhaven.com/.