Our Editor Began Investigating Goldbelly Over Their Suspicious Review System—Then It All Disappeared
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When Goldbelly was founded in 2013, it changed the landscape of online food delivery. The e-commerce platform empowered restaurants and other purveyors to ship their products nationwide. A guy in Florida could order a deep dish pizza from Lou Malnati’s in Chicago. A family in Boston could enjoy fresh seafood delivered straight from Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market. It opened up an entire world of opportunities for food-obsessed Americans.
After a decade in business, Goldbelly now hosts upwards of 1,000 restaurants across all 50 states. They’ve netted over $133 million in investments from private equity firms and famous restaurateur and Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer.
It’s clear that shoppers are willing to pay a premium for Goldbelly products—whether they’re looking for a taste of home or want to enjoy renowned restaurants without booking a flight. We’ve used Goldbelly at the Delish office to try the Tom Cruise-approved coconut cake from Doan’s Bakery in California (and loved every bite).
Goldbelly is essentially a marketplace hosting hundreds of different vendors with their own production, packing, and shipping operations. And each product gets delivered to thousands of customers with varying expectations. With all the variables at play, the occasional bad experience is inevitable. You can see evidence of this on Goldbelly's Better Business Bureau profile.
But after scouring hundreds of vendor pages on the Goldbelly site, we struggled to find a single negative review. In fact, not one vendor on the site had an overall rating lower than four and a half stars. And if vendors didn’t have near perfect star ratings, they appeared to have none at all—even with dozens of individual positive reviews.
On platforms like Google Reviews and Yelp, you can see the distribution of ratings that contribute to the overall average. Goldbelly’s reviews, on the other hand, do not display star ratings at all. Each vendor’s total rating feels almost arbitrary, with no ability to quantifiably track how they achieved their glowing reputation.
Outside of the platform, on other websites, Goldbelly’s reviews tell a different story. Their Better Business Bureau profile, for example, features a rating of 2.23 out of 5—a stark departure from the aggressive positivity on their own site. In just 2023 alone, 91 percent of the reviews gave the company just one star.
Goldbelly has been BBB-accredited since 2015, but the independent watchdog assigned the business a B rating because of the transparent volume of complaints filed against them. “Goldbelly has a much higher volume of complaints, which lowers their rating,” said Melanie McGovern, Director of Public Relations and Social Media at the Better Business Bureau. Yet, at the footer of Goldbelly’s website, they proudly proclaimed that they had an A+ rating from the BBB.
The discrepancy gave us pause, which prompted us to reach out to Goldbelly and their PR team to get more clarity on their review policies. To say they weren’t happy to speak with us is an understatement. After repeated requests, their team either ignored us or declined to provide an official comment.
After we flagged elements of their review system, they began to unceremoniously disappear. Within a week and a half of our call, Goldbelly had deleted star ratings from their platform entirely.
Their previous BBB banner was replaced with a simple widget displaying their accreditation (with no mention of their B rating).
What they did add, however, was a link to a new FAQ section. Goldbelly says they read every review before posting to their site and that their review process is “consistently evolving.”
They also provided some context as to which reviews meet the threshold for publication and which don’t. Naturally, inappropriate and offensive content is rejected. But there’s one parameter that seems a little questionable: “Reviews that contain order-specific details unrelated to the food itself such as carrier delays, are considered circumstances out of our control [and] will not be published.”
Any review mentioning fulfillment issues (the most common complaint on the BBB site) is effectively banned on the platform. The thing is, the cross-country delivery of food is the very foundation of their business—and it can't be included in reviews.
This all follows a similar trend seen across tech companies that have a business model that circumvents liability. Just like Airbnb hosts and Uber drivers, Goldbelly vendors are third party service providers, not employees.
This important distinction allows large companies to deny any culpability when it comes to product or service issues. That's not to say that the products on Goldbelly are entirely bad or always have shipping problems; many of them seem to receive positive reviews. But if a product has an issue, there's virtually no way of knowing.
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