DoorDash published its inaugural ESG Report last year, with the goal of demonstrating our progress and the impact we’re making in the communities we serve. Today, we are proud to share our 2022 ESG Update, detailing some of the new programs, initiatives, and highlights from the past year.
In 2022, DoorDash officially joined forces with Wolt Enterprises Oy, expanding our reach to 27 countries across the globe. Together, we are building a global platform for local commerce with products and services that support hundreds of thousands of merchants in growing their businesses, tens of millions of consumers in accessing the best of their neighborhoods, and millions of people in accessing gainful work opportunities every month.
From December 2021 to December 2022, Dashers earned over $13 billion globally, and in DoorDash-branded markets, we generated over 12% same store sales growth for merchants, while reducing average consumer transaction fees per order by over 8%.
Read on for more highlights spanning our core ESG pillars and stakeholders, below––and click here to read the full update.
Bringing more to merchants, while growing revenue and reach
DoorDash is an advocate for merchants and a partner in addressing their needs. Core to our mission of growing and empowering local economies is our belief in access to opportunity for businesses of all sizes and for entrepreneurs of all backgrounds. In 2022, we continued to deepen our work with more types of merchants, generating over $38 billion in total sales, and launching new initiatives that support the growth of more local businesses across the communities we serve.
We have heard from merchants that providing affordable benefits to staff and accessing capital quickly are two of the key challenges they face today. We led the industry in launching Merchant Benefits, a first-of-its-kind program designed to give merchants access to discounted products and services, including educational benefits, healthcare benefits, hiring and staff management platforms, and more. We also launched DoorDash Capital last year, giving merchants access to revenue-based financing in as little as one day. This helps merchants fund critical expenses like equipment, marketing, rent, hiring, payroll and more. Through our Accelerator programs (for Local Restaurants and for Local Goods) and other initiatives like the Restaurant Disaster Relief Fund, we distributed more than $2 million in direct capital in 2022, with a significant portion distributed to businesses owned by women, immigrants, and people of color.
Two-thirds (67%) of independent merchants agreed that DoorDash has helped them reach new customers they would otherwise not have been able to reach. We continually launch new tools to drive more incremental revenue for businesses on our platform. In 2022, this included an integration with Order with Google, so that restaurant partners using Storefront have more visibility and can accept commission-free food orders directly via Google Search and Maps, as well as launching self-serve advertising tools and services for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space, enabling targeted marketing across the convenience and grocery categories of the DoorDash Marketplace.
A platform that millions value for flexible earnings
Dashing allows people to earn supplemental income on their own terms, and provides earnings opportunities that are virtually always available. By nature of its low barriers to entry, our platform creates access to flexible earning for many people, including communities who have been excluded from equal access to economic opportunity. Whether to make up for lost income, or to support extra expenses and goals, people who qualify to dash are often eligible to begin earning money within a day of signing up.
While Dashers come from all backgrounds, the ability to generate income on top of other sources – often to address specific goals – is what unites the millions of people who seek out the DoorDash platform to earn. In 2022:
More people than ever before leveraged our platform for flexible earnings, with well over 6 million people across the globe earning over $13 billion.
While the average Dasher delivered with DoorDash for less than 4 hours per week, 86% agreed that DoorDash allows them to increase hours and earnings in times of crisis, such as when facing a financial emergency. 73% of Dashers agreed that dashing gives them more control over their circumstances.
88% of Dashers reported having other income streams and responsibilities, including those with a full- or part-time job, those who are students, stay-at-home caregivers, or retired. Additionally, 65% of Dashers said they dash in order to make up for lost income or reduced hours in their existing role, and 30% of Dashers report that their earnings on DoorDash enabled them to avoid reliance on government benefits such as unemployment or nutrition assistance.
Most Dashers are women (57%), and most women Dashers prefer delivery over rideshare as they believe it’s safer and/or because they don’t want to share their car with strangers.
Dashers in communities of color earned over $6.6 billion, and Dashers in rural communities earned more than $3.7 billion.
While we are always working to increase access to dashing, against the uncertain economic backdrop of 2022, we focused especially on helping Dashers preserve their earnings and save on expenses. Our Gas Rewards Program – introduced in March and extended late into the year – included over $90 million in support from DoorDash to preserve Dashers’ earnings.
Additionally, we continue to work directly with Dashers, including those who sit on our Dasher Community Council, to incorporate their feedback around the dashing experience. In 2022, as part of our in-app safety toolkit powered by ADT in the United States, we introduced new SafeDash capabilities to make dashing even safer.
Increasing access to resources within our communities
DoorDash helps people access food, essentials, and other resources in their communities, including in times of personal and broader crisis. In a 2022 survey, more than half (57%) of DoorDash customers said they had used DoorDash to provide a meal for someone who could not leave their own house or was unable to prepare a meal, whether because of an illness, chronic condition, or other circumstance.
We are proud to use our platform to help people impacted by disasters and displacement, to ensure families, refugees, and others have access to food and essentials when they need them most. In 2022, we donated over $1 million in DoorDash gift cards to more than 200 partners and organizations through our Community Credits program. We also continued to operate the DoorDash Restaurant Disaster Relief Fund, which provides grants to small businesses impacted by disasters.
In 2022, 29% of deliveries in the United States were made to consumers in low-income communities and 30% of deliveries were made to consumers in rural communities. Through our social sector partnerships, Project DASH helps expand access to even more people. Last year, Project DASH surpassed 3.5 million lifetime deliveries of food, or an equivalent 60 million meals, on behalf of food banks, food pantries, and other social impact organizations. Additionally, in conjunction with the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, DoorDash has partnered with mayors in 18 U.S. cities to help end hunger in their communities.
Building up programs that address our climate impact
We are building sustainability initiatives and programs that work for merchants, Dashers and consumers in order to operate with less relative environmental cost, long-term.
In 2022, we completed our full scopes 1, 2, and 3 measurements, inclusive of Wolt, for the first time. For the second year in a row, we were net zero across our scope 1 and 2 emissions globally. To achieve this, we’ve invested in clean energy purchases and carbon removal technology, including biochar, wind, solar, and reforestation, to address emissions from our corporate operations and facilities.
Additionally, we are taking efforts to address the climate impact of delivery. In DoorDash-branded markets, over 56 million deliveries were fulfilled by Dashers using a low- or no-emissions vehicle, equating to an estimated 37,000 metric tonnes of CO2e avoided (compared to fulfillment via standard gasoline-powered vehicles). To continue moving this work forward, we continue to educate Dashers and support the switch to electric cars and bicycles, and make improvements to our batching technology in order to reduce the average distance traveled for orders fulfilled through our platform.
We are also working to help reduce waste associated with takeout and delivery. Across 12 countries where Wolt operates, we have established a process to help recycle thousands of delivery bags used by couriers, and to-date, have supported reusable packaging programs in the United States, Estonia, Germany, Finland, and the Czech Republic. We worked with hundreds of merchants to enable over 60,000 orders with reusable packaging in 2022, and are continuing to invest in these efforts.
Continuing to invest in our people
DoorDash is committed to increasing the representation and inclusion of underrepresented populations and evolving company-wide best practices that advance this work. We proudly compensate leadership positions across our nine official Employee Resource Groups – Able (which celebrates physical and neurological diversity), AAPI (Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander), Black, Parents, Pride, Unidos, Indigenous, Veterans, and Women – to reflect the value of their time and invaluable contributions. We developed a series of mandatory unconscious bias trainings for employees Director level and above, as well as additional trainings for all people managers, to increase understanding of unconscious bias in and outside of the workplace and develop techniques to mitigate bias.
As of year-end 2022, women and nonbinary people comprise 48% of our global team (an increase of 2 percentage points year-over-year) and 44% of our Leadership team. In the U.S., underrepresented people of color comprise 40% of our team (an increase of 4 percentage points year-over-year) and 11% of our Leadership team. Additionally, 1 in 5 of all people managers identify as underrepresented people of color.
Although we continued to increase gender and race and ethnicity representation at DoorDash in the past year, we know that we have a continued responsibility to cultivate greater diversity and inclusion within our company, on our platform, in our industry, and in the communities where we operate. We believe that prioritizing DEI empowers our people to be their authentic selves and deliver their best, most impactful work on behalf of our stakeholders. We are continuing to invest in efforts to hire, develop, retain, and advance underrepresented people of color, women, and nonbinary people; increase representation in business-critical roles and leadership; maintain pay equity, and more.
