937 Delivers ‘closing effective immediately’

Thursday afternoon, the service posted this statement to its Facebook page:

“In the Fall of 2020, 937 Delivers was established as a restaurant-and employee-owned food delivery cooperative. The need for 937 Delivers was great, coming after months of restaurant owners and their employees struggling to keep their doors open through extremely difficult times.

As the weather grew colder, Covid-19 cases surged and people became reluctant to eat indoors. The founding members of 937 Delivers knew they had to work fast to provide an alternative to the costly national delivery options. Working with the nonprofit developer Co-op Dayton, and with support from the City of Dayton, Downtown Dayton Partnership and Montgomery County, this team of entrepreneurs and eternal supporters of Dayton, quickly developed the plan to start this local service where all the money would stay in the Dayton market. 937 Delivers was born: a collective response, and an economic model based on putting people -the employees, small business owners, and restaurant customers - first.

We are so proud that 937 Delivers was able to deliver so many tasty meals to your homes, to bring our restaurant partners hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, to pay fair wages to employees that would otherwise have been un- or under-employed, and to keep this money in the local Dayton economy.

As winter has turned to Spring and Summer 2021, our restaurant partners came roaring back. We’re thrilled to see full patios and bustling dining rooms - and while it’s meant fewer deliveries, lower sales, and reduced staff for 937 Delivers, we have always existed to serve this important sector in an unprecedented time.

937 Delivers was created and designed as a pandemic response, but now this response is not what our restaurants and workers need. In consultation and discussion with both groups, we have decided to put 937 Delivers on a hiatus and will no longer be delivering - at least for the time being.

We will be taking time to explore better systems and models that speak more to the current needs of our local restaurants and our employees. There are groups in cities around the country working to create sustainable models for local cooperative delivery services, and we will continue to be part of this conversation and look for innovations we can try here in Dayton. We’re proud of what we have accomplished, and realistic about what it will take to move forward. We feel deep love and gratitude to our loyal customers, our restaurant partners and most of all our team of drivers and dispatchers. And we are thrilled that our co-op helped this vital sector come together to weather a tough season.”

We will update this story as soon as we learn more.