We Checked 50 Restaurants on DoorDash and UberEats. 80% had Zero Allergy Safety Features.

If you have a food allergy and you order delivery, you have probably done this: typed “peanut allergy” into a dish’s comment box and hoped for the best.

That comment box is not an allergy system. A life-threatening allergy might be buried among notes like “extra napkins” and “ring doorbell.” There is no guarantee the kitchen sees it, no way to confirm they understood it, and no indication it triggers critical safety protocols like clean utensils, separate prep surfaces, or glove changes. When you dine in, you can tell a server about your allergy, the kitchen is alerted, and precautions are taken. But a comment box might not even make it to the kitchen.

Many restaurants probably think that comment box is enough. We wanted to find out how many.

What We Did

Over the past month, I checked about 50 restaurants across Westchester County, New York, on both DoorDash and Uber Eats. For each one, I asked a simple question: does this restaurant give me any way to communicate a food allergy through the delivery app?

The answer, overwhelmingly, was no.

What We Found

On both platforms, roughly 4 in 5 restaurants give you no way to communicate your allergy beyond a generic comment box.

DoorDash:

• 80% had zero allergy information or tools

• 8% had some allergen labels on menu items

• 12% offered a dedicated allergy intake form

Uber Eats:

• 79% had zero allergy information or tools

• 6% had some allergen labels

• 15% offered a dedicated allergy intake form

Red, Yellow, Green: A Simple Framework

To make sense of these results, we developed a three-tier rating system.

🟢 Green Zone: Dedicated Allergy Intake Form. A clickable form where you can select your specific allergens. This creates a clear record that goes to the kitchen and can trigger real safety protocols. Restaurants like Bareburger, Taco Project, Saigonese, Terra Rustica, and Playa Bowls had these enabled across both platforms and deserve recognition for it.

🟡 Yellow Zone: Labels Only. Some restaurants label menu items with allergen info (i.e. "Contains: nuts, dairy"). This is helpful for choosing what to order, but one-directional. You are informed; the kitchen is not. Cross-contact is still a very real risk. 

🔴 Red Zone: Comment Box Only. This is where 80% of restaurants sit, with no allergen labels and no intake form. Just a comment box that gives you no way of knowing whether the restaurant is prepared to handle your allergy.

Why This Matters

About 33 million Americans have food allergies, including roughly 1 in 13 children. Food delivery is how millions of families eat multiple nights a week. Yet on the two largest delivery platforms, the vast majority of restaurants have no allergy communication tools enabled.

Here’s the thing: the tools already exist. Restaurants have the ability to add allergen intake forms, a feature already built into both platforms. Most restaurants just have not turned them on.

What Comes Next

An intake form is no guarantee of safety. But it tells you that the restaurant knows food allergies exist, has opted into a system to handle them, and is expecting your information. That’s reassuring. And right now, on 80% of listings, they see nothing.

So we are going to do something about it. Over the coming weeks and months, Safe Plate Alliance will be reaching out directly to restaurants in Westchester to ask them to enable these features. We will share what we learn, what works, and how you can do the same in your community.

Stay tuned. And if you have a delivery allergy experience of your own, we’d love to hear about it: safeplatealliance@gmail.com.

Methodology: This informal survey was conducted in January and February 2026 across approximately 50 restaurants in Westchester County, NY, with listings on DoorDash and Uber Eats. Each restaurant was checked for the presence of (1) a dedicated allergy intake form, (2) allergen labels on menu items, or (3) neither. This is not a statistically representative sample; it is intended to illustrate the scope of the problem.