Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025 | 2 a.m.
Christina Martin has been on a crusade against fraudulent business practices on food-delivery apps since April 2024 when she found out her Las Vegas pizza shop was being impersonated by another restaurant.
While customers thought they were ordering from Manizza’s Pizza on UberEats, they were getting food from another establishment, Martin discovered. She found more than a dozen other businesses being impersonated on the app by the restaurant, she said.
That led to the food-delivery platform temporarily suspending applications for “ghost kitchens” in Las Vegas and a class-action lawsuit with other local businesses against the app.
Martin’s work is continuing at the Nevada Legislature, where she spoke Monday in favor of Assembly Bill 116 proposed by Assemblymember Selena Torres-Fossett, D-Las Vegas, that would force delivery apps to verify the business license and health permit of a restaurant.
“My team holds really high standards and the restaurant in question had really ugly health reports,” Martin told the Assembly Committee on Commerce and Labor. “We want protections in place not just for our small businesses … but also for our consumers, who deserve to know where their food is coming from.”
Torres-Fossett said food-delivery apps had a responsibility to ensure companies on their platforms are licensed and not purporting to be another shop. If the bill is passed into law, failure to comply would be a misdemeanor resulting in up to six months of jail time and a $1,000 fine.
The committee took no action on the bill in Monday’s hearing.
After Martin shared her experience with Uber, Torres-Fossett said the pizza shop owner was offered credits to use on the company’s apps.
“That’s not a fair exchange for someone replicating or duplicating your business online and tarnishing your reputation,” Torres-Fossett said. “The intent of this legislation really is to hold food-delivery apps accountable.”
Best Local Chef: James Trees
James Trees, who owns Esther’s Kitchen in Las Vegas’ Arts District, shared his own story, saying he only found out his restaurant was being impersonated after reading a one-star Google review of it.
Delivery drivers have shown up to his restaurant looking to pick up food that he doesn’t even serve, Trees said. He doesn’t use third-party platforms for delivery partially because of their business fees, which start at 15% for Uber, digging into profitability.
“We actually have a higher food cost percentage due to the quality of the product that we use, so it enables bad actors who are using the lowest-quality food products to” take his branding, Trees said. “It’s a bad situation.”
Representatives from Uber, Grubhub and TechNet, a lobbying organization that has the two companies as members, testified against the bill.
Proposed amendments from Uber included waiving the health permit requirement, arguing that the business license would suffice in proving a business’s legitimacy. Uber’s proposal also would bring the maximum penalty down from a misdemeanor to a $500 civil penalty per violation.
Torres-Fossett, a member of the commerce and labor committee, said that would be a “negligible amount for a large food-delivery platform.”
“This minimal fine does little to deter platforms from allowing unregulated ghost kitchens to operate,” Torres-Fossett said. “Without stronger enforcement measures, consumers remain at risk and legitimate restaurants continue to face unfair competition.”
Uber also asked that the bill only require verification for new restaurants on the platform, not ones that are already delivering through the app, and wants further clarity on who would enforce the legislation.
Edith Duarte, representing TechNet, said she believed the legislation would also extend outside of restaurants, including supermarket delis and convenience stores found on delivery apps.
She also questioned whether delivery apps would have to continuously verify the restaurants’ permits, especially since they can expire or be suspended.
Representatives for the three app organizations said they wanted to continue working with Torres-Fossett on the legislation.
“There’s a solution, we think, that can get you what you need without putting an unnecessary burden on either the platform or the merchants that they serve,” Mike Fiorentino, representing DoorDash, told the committee.
Kimball Jones, an attorney with Bighorn Law, represents multiple restaurant owners he says were “victimized” by fraud only possible through delivery apps. The platforms are financially motivated to ignore imposters because of the fees on each order, he argued.
“The incentive structure is backwards for them to simply do the right thing,” Jones said. “That may explain the reason why very simple and obvious safety protocols have not been put in place on these apps.”