Tri-Cities Food Dudes deliver restaurant favorites to get you through COVID-19

The owner of Tri-Cities Food Dudes, a new Tri-Cities food delivery service, has a passion for her fellow restaurant owners.

Tracy LeMarr is so fervent that drivers will take food from Benton City to Finley and anywhere in between.

Immediately after restaurants were ordered closed in March to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the owner of The Chicken Shack knew her restaurants couldn’t survive with just pickup and delivery

As the owner of both West Richland and Pasco chicken locations plus Wine Notes wine bar in West Richland, she knew third-party delivery services would take 30 percent off the top of her delivery orders.

So LeMarr created her own service just for her restaurants.

Then other restaurant owners — often those who didn’t have an online presence or a way to manage online orders — started asking LeMarr if she could deliver for them, too.

“It wasn’t intended to be a business, it was intended to be a solution,” LeMarr said. “I was trying to solve my problem but now I’m solving everybody else’s problem too.”

LeMarr worked with a software company to develop tcfooddudes.com. An Android app also is available and an app for Apple will soon be out. Plus the company has a full-time dispatcher.

“With third-parties, if there was a mistake — you can’t get hold of the client or driver or third-party service. You had to sit around waiting for the bad review the next day,” she said.

The dispatcher is the personal touch that she says won’t be found with non-local services. She aims to be a locally-owned service for locally-owned eateries.

“After I got out of my cocoon and starting talking to people, I didn’t realize how bad it was for other businesses,” she said.

With Benton and Franklin counties still facing restrictions around COVID, she said many owners are in the kitchen cooking the meals — so taking phone orders can become daunting.

Plus, it can be overwhelming for a busy restaurant owner to join an online delivery service.

LeMarr says she takes it a step further and works with all the clients to get their restaurant set up with Food Dudes including with the necessary software and button for their websites to direct customers to the delivery site.

The delivery range is up to the restaurants, which must take into account how well their food travels — and the cost that will reflect the distance.

LeMarr says owners who have been reluctant to join the online ordering and delivery trend have been forced to quickly adapt during the pandemic closures. However, for many restaurant owners, the expense of the service was too high.

LeMarr wants her service to be successful and is on a mission to drum up as much business as possible for Tri-Cities restaurants.

The cost for restaurants who join Tri-Cities Food Dudes is about 10 percent of the meal prices compared to the 30 percent for chain delivery services, such as GrubHub, Uber Eats and DoorDash.

She says her cost covers the basics — but mostly she cares about the restaurant industry.

“The only way to stop using third parties is to have a service that is comparable. I want (Tri-Cities Food Dudes) to be successful,” she said. “We as an industry need to bond locally and take back our service. If we bind together we can be strong enough to find our own solution.”