Does your restaurant or food services business use independent contractors for delivery services to customers? It’s a wonderful way to serve customers and grow your sales – but its also a risky operational exposure and needs to be managed properly. At Sutherland-Scherff we specialize in restaurants and have the experience to help you build a solid risk management program for delivery services.
For most of our clients the service is provided by an independent contractor, either an individual or a larger company specializing in providing this service. You should always use an independent contractor agreement that specifically requires the independent contractor to provide both Commercial Auto Liability insurance, as well as Commercial General Liability insurance.
You should also require that your restaurant be named as an Additional Insured on both of those policies. You should require the contractor provide evidence of all insurance policies (via a standard Certificate of Insurance) and ask for a waiver of subrogation on the Workers Compensation policy.
When you take the order and create the relationship with the customer, you are also increasing your legal exposure if the driver winds up committing some act of physical or personal injury against the customer. For example, your contractor provides a driver who is a convicted sex offender (of which you had no knowledge) and delivers an order to a single female customer. Later that night the driver returns and sexually assaults the customer.
This all sounds very serious and you may not want to deal with all of these issues yourself – great! Call Sutherland-Scherff today and we can custom develop a program for managing risk across all of your operational exposures.
