On January 1, California established its Food Delivery Platforms Assembly Bill to ensure that customer service disclosures are plainly outlined.
The Assembly Bill, AB 578, aims to address nationwide consumer complaints, with California-based delivery companies such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Postmates now dominating the US food delivery market.
In a series of CX-related laws released in the new year at state level, these will allow customers access to clearer transparency in operational practices.
Acting as an update to the Fair Food Delivery Act, this assembly bill expects to further enhance customer service standards for food delivery platforms across the state.
Previously, customers have reported unfair customer experiences in food delivery services, often not receiving adequate help trying to resolve issues created by the company rather than the consumer.
Firstly, customers had been allegedly receiving in-app credits for late, missing, or incorrect deliveries, rather than the companies choosing to refund the order.
Furthermore, customers have reported experiencing these credits expiring after a certain period, and seeing limited choices on where to spend these credits. And when trying to contact support systems for resolutions, customers reported experiencing automation services that would frequently fail to provide valuable help.
Customers have also experienced unfair pricing, with food delivery systems allegedly withholding hidden or unclear costs from customers, misleading them about the accurate prices of their services.
This new bill aims to expand the previously established Fair Food Delivery Act 2020, a state law that focused on pricing and tipping with restaurants, leaving significant gaps in the delivery service sector.
Approved by California Governor Gavin Newsom in October, AB 578 rules that food delivery platforms must now operate in accordance with California’s new customer, restaurant, and delivery workers’ policies.
Customers: Food delivery platforms are now expected to handle customer issues more effectively, including providing full refunds to the original payment method if the customer is not at fault for the problem. Platforms can only deny refunds if they can provide evidence of the customer’s wrongdoing. During customer support, platforms are now expected to offer human customer support if an automated system cannot fulfill a request.
Restaurants: Platforms must now offer clear information around pricing, fees, and order handling to both restaurants and consumers, ensuring that responsibility for incorrect orders and order statuses can be distinguished. This will reduce both restaurant and consumer confusion, disputes, and financial uncertainty throughout the customer journey.
Delivery Workers: Having raised several concerns around the pay structure, delivery workers have been set new pay transparency rules. After each delivery, delivery workers should receive a breakdown of their earnings, including base pay, tips, and any additional bonuses. Platforms may not use tips to reduce the base pay, and must present earnings information clearly to show how their pay is calculated to reduce compensation confusion.
These changes limit platform discretion, ensuring that everyone involved in the customer journey understands the minimum expectations across the food delivery market. This aims to reduce conflict between these three groups and allow for clearer communication when needed to resolve these issues.
How Does This Improve Customer Experience Standards?
By instilling AB 578 into California’s customer services, the CX space becomes clearer on the standards it expects, ensuring full transparency around food delivery platforms.
Firstly, food delivery customers can now expect stronger reliability when it comes to refunding, now gaining the right to full money back for an incorrect order.
This allows for reduced customer friction when refunds are handled automatically and are not receiving platform credits that they may not use.
For the customer-facing teams, this reduces workloads on refund issues if platforms choose to escalate these issues systematically, leaving more room for valuable interactions as platforms expand their service teams when more chatbots fail.
Customers can now experience greater transparency in pricing, seeing clearer breakdowns of payments, itemizing product prices, tips, and additional fees, regardless of the platform they use, for a better understanding of what they are paying for.
This law increases the overall trust and loyalty between delivery platforms and Californian consumers, when customers are paying for delivery services with the fee they’ve been given, that increases brand loyalty due to large expectations in hidden fee costs.
It shifts the experience in the state to feel fair and predictable, with one state law governing delivery platforms, customers can now choose to trust a brand before they have even begun their customer journey.
AB 578 also responds to several significant customer complaints made toward California-based delivery platforms.
In December 2025, the Californian grocery delivery service, Instacart, had removed its pricing test model from its platform after numerous complaints were made about unfair pricing.
This has also included $60MN fine from the FTC earlier the same month, alleging that Instacart had not issued refunds to its customers.
This bill aims to prevent these CX risks and to stop platforms from exploiting customer loyalty through dynamic pricing and refusing to issue refunds.
Furthermore, California-based delivery platform, Grubhub, had allegedly been listing restaurants on its site without receiving consent to do so.
The delivery platform was allegedly misleading customers into believing they were ordering food from an approved partner of a restaurant, however, many of these restaurants claimed to have no relationship with the platform.
These conflicts represent a broader pattern with online delivery companies, with frequent complaints surrounding controlled listings, unfair pricing models, and reshaping customer responses to fit a preferred narrative.
This law begins to address these concerns, highlighting how platform discretion can negatively impact the customer experience if customers recognize that brands are using this strategy for personal gain rather than choosing to improve services.
