— by Rob Gurwitt

It was during the first wave of the pandemic. Jarrett Berke and John Pepper were sitting in Hanover, looking out at Main Street and talking, when a delivery driver for Lou’s, which Berke owns, drove by. A few minutes later, a delivery driver for Boloco, which Pepper owns, drove by. “This is so dumb,” one of them remarked. “Can’t we do it better?”

The two hadn’t known each other well before the pandemic, but there’s something about an existential threat to your livelihood that brings business owners together. “It was a super hard time and we were all trying to figure it out—this thing none of us had ever experienced,” says Berke. Lou’s had never done delivery—it wasn’t even an option Berke would consider—and suddenly, the restaurant had no choice. But that day, he and Pepper agreed it made no sense to have two restaurants a stone’s throw from one another operating independent delivery services.

“At first, we thought we could call each other about deliveries. But then it turned into this,” says Berke.

This is UVER, which is short for Upper Valley Eateries and Retail Coop… and yes, the play on “Uber” is intentional. That’s because UVER is a deliberate attempt to build a locally driven alternative to the giants of the 3rd-party food delivery technosphere: Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub. And because, if you own a small restaurant, it’s hard not to be ticked off at the giants.

For starters, they have a habit of taking orders for and delivering from restaurants they’ve never even cut a deal with—and not revealing what they’re charging customers. (Check out Jordan Barry’s entertaining Seven Days writeup earlier this month about using Grubhub to order a lobster roll from a place in Burlington that hadn’t been open since October.)

And then there are the commissions and fees they charge the restaurants they do have deals with, which can reportedly run from 10-25 percent for DoorDash, according to the app builder AppInstitute, and closer to 32 percent for Grubhub. Before the pandemic, many restaurateurs found this bearable because they could make it up with in-person dining. For the last two years, though, not so much—except a lot of them felt they had no choice.

Even more aggravating—and worrisome to people like Pepper and Berke—is that in some places the delivery services are elbowing their way into the food business itself. As UVER puts it on its About page, which is essentially a scrappy small-restaurant manifesto, “They are also using customer information from the restaurants to establish ‘ghost kitchens’ and compete with the same independent restaurants they claim they serve.”

So, in July last year, Berke, Pepper, and Murphy’s/Impasto owner Nigel Leeming launched UVER. They brought in Chris Acker, who’d been driving for FedEx and before that worked at the River Valley Club, to run it. Its goal was right there in its mission statement: To keep our economy vibrant by protecting our restaurants and retailers from national 3rd party delivery companies that wipe out profits and take money out of our community.

It had four restaurants—Lou’s, Boloco, Murphy’s, and Impasto—and two drivers: Acker and a high school student he’d hired. “If an order came in,” says Acker, “we got giddy.”

These days, seven months later, UVER is up to 12 restaurants and 12 drivers, who deliver to any address within seven miles of the restaurant a customer ordered from (it was five miles until Feb. 9). If you look at the list (which you’ll find here) you’ll notice something interesting: Beyond the original four, all the rest are in Lebanon or WRJ. “We thought for sure the Hanover restaurants would be leading the charge,” says Berke. But it turns out that UVER’s biggest customer base is working families in Lebanon, who are more likely to figure they can justify the delivery charge. Beyond the original four, restaurants in Hanover have been more resistant. “They’re doing tons of delivery through Grubhub, and I say, ‘They’re just stealing your money,’ but we just can’t get through to them,” Berke says.

At heart, UVER does what the big players do: It delivers food, charges customers a fee, and charges restaurants a commission. But its structure is very different. It’s a consumer co-op, which means its users—in this case, restaurants’ customers—can buy memberships, which entitle them to discounts and a say in how the business is run. And because its goal is also to serve local restaurants, its cut is smaller and its priorities are community-focused. “When there’s an issue with your delivery, you can pick up the phone and someone like me is on other end, and we can fix it,” says Acker. “With DoorDash, good luck trying to have satisfactory customer service.”

UVER’s been slow-growing—“We’re trying not to get too big for our britches,” is how Acker puts it. For one thing, it’s been constrained in where it can deliver. “Since Day One we’ve had so many emails from folks in Enfield, Lyme, the northern parts of Norwich, they’ve all said, ‘We’ll pay for you to come here.’ But it’s been a matter of us not having the driver fleet to take someone out of the delivery game for 45 minutes,” Acker explains. Still, it plans to expand to Enfield soon, and its new 7-mile radius should help bring in new customers, as well.

As for that “retail” part of its name… It’s a reference to farms, which the founding team had initially hoped to bring on board as well. “We just haven’t gotten there,” says Berke. “It would be awesome to do that some day, and we’ll get there, but we’re such a small operation. We have to stick with what works for now, then build so we can get more employees and get to the point where can travel out to farms and chat with them.”