How LocalCooking works
LocalCooking connects you with the cooks, teams, and food businesses near you — for delivery, pickup, and catering. We're a marketplace and a set of tools, not a kitchen and not a courier: the food is made by independent people in your neighborhood, and you deal with them directly. Everything we build follows from a few beliefs.
Every cook, team, and food business here is an independent business. They set their own prices, choose what they make, and control their own workload — clocking in when they're ready to cook and approving orders that would push them past a comfortable pace, rather than silently drowning. We take a small, transparent cut so the platform can exist; the rest is theirs.
Reputation should reflect reality. Ratings use a time-decayed, trust-weighted score, so a handful of glowing reviews doesn't outrank a long track record and stale praise gradually fades. “Most popular” means the most completed orders and reservations — refunds excluded — not a vanity counter. Contact details are verified, and credentials are checked, not just claimed.
Meals are perishable and personal. Dishes carry their real handling — made-to-order hot and refrigerated food, in-stock items, or frozen dishes shipped on a chosen day — and ordering respects when a cook is actually available to make something. We ask cooks to describe ingredients and allergens honestly, and we say so plainly when something can't be delivered safely.
Our cut is $1.50 per item — a fixed amount, not a percentage, whatever the item costs. Card processing is Stripe's own fee on top and goes to Stripe: payments and cook payouts run through them, and we never hold your card. When something goes wrong, refunds and disputes are handled in the open, with a fair window for both sides.
Big orders aren't a checkout button — they're a negotiation. You and the cook (or team) work out the time, the menu, and the price together in the conversation, and either side can revise the deal until you both agree. We'll do the arithmetic and suggest a price from the dishes and headcount, but the number is always yours to settle.
Search and browse favor the cooks and dishes people actually order — and come back to — near you. Nobody can pay to rank higher: there is no sponsored placement here, and no code to sell it with. Companies can list their presence and links, and that listing is not a ranking.
You choose how precisely your location appears publicly. We collect what's needed to get food to you and little more, and we tell you what we keep and why. The details are in our Privacy Policy — in plain language, not fine print.
The philosophy above is the "why." The binding details — how orders, refunds, food safety, and your data are actually handled — live in our policies, written to be read: