As the end of 2024 nears and Grubhub’s 20th anniversary festivities come to a close, we had a great year celebrating Grubhub’s past AND some exciting changes for our future, including our official move to The MART and giant leap toward eliminating direct emissions in our operations. 

Reducing Our Corporate Climate Footprint

Our new headquarters allows our 700+ Chicago-based employees to be on the same floor in a fresh, collaborative space and significantly reduces our direct carbon emissions. The MART is LEED Gold Certified, leveraging innovative approaches to energy conservation, water use reduction, and enhanced indoor air quality. The building also uses 100 percent renewable energy and is one of the largest buildings in the world to be RESET certified, a stringent indoor air quality certification process. Additionally, our team will have access to compost stations for disposal of certain foods and packaging. 

“Grubhub was founded in the Windy City 20 years ago, and we are proud to have our corporate headquarters in the city that gave us our start while providing our hometown employees a more sustainable space that better fits our company’s needs, ” said Dave Tovar, SVP of Communications and Government Relations at Grubhub. “Our new space at The MART allows us to work more collaboratively and focus on the innovative work ahead in 2025.”

Helping Our Merchants, Customers and Delivery Partners Make More Sustainable Choices

In addition to reducing the carbon footprint of our hometown’s corporate office, we are equally committed to finding creative ways to help our merchants, customers, and delivery partners operate more sustainably in their day-to-day lives. 

Merchant and Customers

Most recently, in October 2024, we partnered with DeliverZero, a reusable packaging company committed to making food delivery more sustainable. DeliverZero’s packaging is designed to be returned and reused up to 1,000 times, eliminating waste and reducing emissions associated with packaging production. Through this partnership, participating restaurants have a reusable container option added to their Grubhub menu that customers can either have picked up from their home or can drop off at a return point post-meal. Today, our customers can request reusable containers when they order from almost 100 restaurants in Denver, Boulder, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and New York City. 

In January 2023, Grubhub partnered with Topanga.io, a leading reusable packaging management platform to provide integrated zero-waste takeout services on U.S. college campuses through Topanga.io’s ReusePass program. From Fall 2023 through Spring 2024, 40,000 students diverted more than 758,000 single-use containers by choosing to reuse them. Today, we offer this program at 16 campuses, including Auburn University, Boston University, Colorado State, University of Delaware, and The Ohio State University. 

In February 2021, we joined Habits of Waste’s #CutOutCutleryPartnership to reduce the number of single-use plastics that enter the environment and lower costs for our restaurant partners. As a result, Grubhub’s platform defaults to zero utensils and napkins with every order (although diners may opt-in to request plasticware if needed.) To date, our diners have opted out of receiving single-use plastic cutlery in nearly 400 million orders. 

We are also committed to recovering and redirecting food that would otherwise go to waste. Since 2020, the Grubhub Community Fund* has partnered with Rescuing Leftover Cuisine and FoodRecovery.org (formerly MEANS Database) to recover and redirect more than 40 million pounds of food to local food banks & community organizations. Learn more about how we are helping close the hunger gap here. 

Delivery Partners 

In New York City, our largest market, an average of 6,500 delivery partners make Grubhub deliveries via bike each month. To help ensure our delivery partners have safe, certified e-bike access, in April 2023 we partnered with JOCO, an NYC delivery e-bike rental platform, to increase access to safe e-bike equipment and further spread awareness on e-bike, lithium-ion battery, and charging safety. Our partnership with JOCO includes co-sponsoring two hubs that any Grubhub biker can use to rest, charge their phone, get free gear, use the restroom, and receive e-bike safety materials. We also provide select Grubhub bikers monthly credits for JOCO e-bike use to help offset operational costs and support safe charging and storage.

As we look to the future, we will continue to leverage our business, knowledge, and partnerships to drive meaningful change and operate more sustainably. While progress takes time, we are laying the foundation today to create a brighter, greener future for our communities, employees, merchants, customers, and delivery partners, and are committed to sharing updates as we reach key sustainability milestones. 

*The Grubhub Community Fund is a donor advised fund at a national sponsoring organization. The Grubhub Community Fund is made possible through donations from our customers through our Donate the Change feature. Grubhub matches contributions on eligible Grubhub+orders.