Doordash Expands Beyond Delivery, Rolls Out Creator Program For Short Videos, AI Features, Dine-In Rewards

DoorDash is moving to reshape its role in the food and retail ecosystem, unveiling on Tuesday a series of features that borrow directly from the worlds of social media, loyalty programs, and artificial intelligence.

The company announced a creator program to pay users for producing short-form videos of their meals, rolled out “Going Out” dining rewards, and introduced AI-powered personalization tools.

The creator program, open initially in 20 U.S. cities such as Atlanta, Austin, Miami, and San Francisco, will compensate participants who record videos of local dishes. The goal is to bring discovery into the app, letting users preview meals before they order. Uber Eats piloted a similar TikTok-style feed last year, underscoring how delivery apps are racing to embed content into their platforms as a way of keeping users engaged. DoorDash has not yet detailed its monetization structure for creators, but said the initiative will expand nationwide through the end of the year.

Another step is Going Out, a feature that rewards customers for dining in restaurants. DashPass members can earn exclusive benefits and redeem offers when eating out, with early testers receiving an average of $9 in value per order. Rewards are now live at thousands of restaurants across the U.S. and Australia, and for a limited period, even non-members will gain access.

“With Going Out, you can find and redeem exclusive in-app offers when you dine in and earn rewards just for coming back,” said Parisa Sadrzadeh, vice president of strategy and operations, at a press event on Monday. “This year, Going Out customers received an average of $9 in value per order when using offers.”

The feature positions DoorDash in direct competition with companies like OpenTable and Resy, especially as it integrates with SevenRooms, the hospitality platform it acquired earlier this year, to allow in-app reservations.

Artificial intelligence is also playing a bigger role. The DoorDash app now generates personalized recommendations based on user history, budget, dietary needs, location, and even time of day. At checkout, a “Complement your Cart” section proposes add-ons to simplify grocery shopping.

Meanwhile, new smart tags help users filter restaurant menus by identifying dishes as vegetarian, gluten-free, high-protein, or spicy, drawing from reviews, text, and photos. These tags are already live in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

“We’re looking at an individual restaurant item, and we use every piece of information we have. The customer reviews, the text from the merchant, the photo of the item, to start to infer things about those items,” Austin Haugen, DoorDash’s VP of product, said at the event. “So we can learn this item is vegetarian, this one is gluten free, spicy, high in protein, etc. Once we infer this about the items, you’ll start to see these tags around the app.”

Beyond food, the company has expanded its comparison shopping tools to cover categories like beauty, electronics, and pet supplies, building on a feature previously limited to alcohol.

The strategy reflects an intensifying battle among delivery giants to capture not just orders but consumer attention and loyalty. Uber Eats has leaned on cross-platform perks with Uber’s rides and has been experimenting with its own video-driven discovery features. Grubhub, meanwhile, has turned to partnerships, such as its tie-up with Amazon Prime, to expand its equivalent of DashPass.

Each company is trying to redefine itself as more than a logistics network: Uber Eats as an integrated lifestyle platform, Grubhub as a membership-driven service, and DoorDash as a hybrid of marketplace, media hub, and AI-powered shopping assistant.