Is ‘Menu Scraping’ Legal for Third-Party Delivery Services?

The advent of on-demand food delivery can be traced back to the early 2000s when the use of GrubHub, Seamless and numerous other online and mobile food-ordering systems became commonplace among college students and young professionals throughout the United States. Gone were the days of leafing through a pile of crumpled menus to order takeout. Now, one could quickly search for local restaurants, view their menus, and order and pay online. Once they were firmly established, it was only a matter of time before these takeout-focused services added delivery as an option for those willing to pay. 

When they first started, third-party food delivery platforms only listed the menus of their partner restaurants—the ones that agreed to forfeit a percentage of their sales in exchange for the increased demand generated through online ordering. But as competition increased among third-party delivery services, a problem emerged: customers were more loyal to their favorite restaurants than to…