The Scary Thing That Happened Last Time I Ordered Food Delivery

Plus: a new way to think about egg prices, and Starbucks’ latest gambit to win back customers

Hi readers. A weird and unsettling thing happened to me last week when I ordered food delivery. After digging for an explanation with the NYPD, a cybersecurity expert, UberEats, and the courier company that fulfilled my order, I still have more questions than answers. I’m sharing the experience with all of you mostly as a PSA for anyone who finds herself in a similar situation, but also as a last-ditch attempt to crowdsource potential explanations. I’ve watched too many crime dramas to let this go without some Prime Suspect-style closure!

Before I go into the details, also in today’s newsletter…

• One way to outsmart rising egg prices 

• What’s behind that new smiley face on your Starbucks cup 

• What some of Marion Nestle’s colleagues had to say about her — that didn’t wind up in my New York Times profile

Okay, Now for the Creepy Story

On a recent Saturday night, some friends had come over, and I put in a delivery order from one of our go-to local spots; a restaurant I’ve ordered from dozens of times over the years. The food arrived, and shortly afterward I started to get texts from a number with a New York City area code that I didn’t know.

Glancing at the texts as I was spooning out fried rice and filling kid water cups, I guess I assumed it was the restaurant, texting to tell me that part of the order had been left behind? Or maybe I accidentally got part of someone else’s order? But then a few minutes later, things got weirder. 

Reading the texts made my blood run cold. My husband, Andrew, was out of town for the weekend, meaning I was at home on my own with our kids. I passed the phone between my friend M and her husband, G, and while we were staring at each other figuring out what to do next, the number flashed up on my phone. I let the call go through to voicemail, but the texts kept coming.    

At that point, my very level-headed friend M insisted that I call 911, which I did. Mostly, we ignored the calls as they continued to come through. A couple of times, I asked G to answer the phone – wanting the caller to hear a male voice – and the line immediately went dead.   

I checked the UberEats app to see if they had a hotline I could call for help with this sort of thing. There was no phone number, but I filled out an online form about the situation to alert their Trust & Safety team. Not an immediate help.  

Though I placed my order on the UberEats app, I knew that the restaurant had used a local delivery company called Relay to deliver it (Relay had sent me an automated text with the delivery tracking link). I clicked around on Relay’s site until I found a “help” button, and was placed into a chat with a company rep. I asked if the courier would have access to my phone number (the answer was “yes”). After I explained the situation, the rep told me that if I felt unsafe I should call 911, which I had already done. Another dead end.      

The NYPD officers who responded to my 911 call took a look at the messages, told me to block the number, and said that if anyone unfamiliar came to the door, I should call the police again. Not the most reassuring game plan considering that in a few hours I would be sleeping in a house alone with young kids. I asked them whether they saw this sort of thing … a lot? Any idea who could be sending the messages? “Once you enter all your information on these websites,” one said, “you don’t know who has access to it.”

The phone calls and texts stopped around midnight (strangely, even after I blocked the number, calls kept coming through). In the days afterward I couldn’t stop thinking about the incident. Someone with (presumably) bad intentions had my phone number and my address; if the messages were coming from my courier, he had seen me, too. I had opened the door to him. How many times had I done the same thing, even when I was the only adult at home? And if the threatening messages weren’t coming from the courier … then who? And to what end?

I wanted to know what had happened – for my own sense of security, but also because if this is in fact something happening more broadly, we should all know how to protect ourselves. Over the next few days, I followed the issue up with UberEats, Relay, the NYPD, and a lawyer friend whose practice area is cybersecurity. Here’s what I learned: 

• A representative for UberEats told me that when an order is delivered by UberEats, all communication happens via their platform, which means neither the courier nor the restaurant has access to the customer’s telephone number. But, in this case, the restaurant had completed its own delivery – meaning UberEats had needed to hand over my telephone number. While it’s not immediately obvious to an UberEats user how each restaurant fulfills its orders, the information is available if you click around a bit on the restaurant’s landing page. 

• Relay looked into the incident, and told me the phone number that contacted me was not associated with the courier who dropped my order (they had no record of the phone number in their system). The courier in question had been delivering for them without incident since 2022. Their GPS records showed he had left the area immediately after delivering my food, and had gone on to complete several other orders that night.  

• Both Relay and UberEats pointed out that restaurant employees would have had access to the information included in those texts. But the place I ordered from was a high-volume restaurant, in the middle of the Saturday dinner rush; it seemed unlikely that someone there had taken time out to harass a delivery customer. And for what purpose?  

The only other possibility seemed to me to be that the data had been stolen online, and a scammer was hoping to get me on the phone, use this information to make me feel unsafe, and perhaps financially extort me. Both companies told me there was no indication that their systems had been compromised (UberEats said that information included in the texts – the order pickup time – was not even recorded in their system). In a last-ditch attempt to understand whether a data breach was still a possibility here, I called an old friend who works as a lawyer specializing in cybersecurity risk. 

My friend couldn’t speak on the record about these two companies, but said that in a situation like this food delivery – where one company’s platform was handing over information to another company’s platform – the point of connection between the two systems is a weak spot where it can be easier for a hacker to listen in, and without either company being aware of it. It’s possible that someone had gained access to my information this way; it’s also possible that someone had gained access to the information on one of the platforms using stolen login credentials. He said that while large hacking incidents make the news, these sorts of smaller data breaches happen all the time.  

 A spokesperson for the NYPD said the agency couldn’t shed any light on how common scenarios like mine are; 911 data aren’t tracked with this level of specificity. (Um, what?!) I’ll probably never know for sure who was calling me, or what their goal was. But the officers who responded to my call did have this helpful advice to share for anyone in a similar position:

1. Don’t answer texts or calls from an unfamiliar number; engaging will only give a potential scammer – or stalker – leverage and power. Block the number.  

2. If you feel unsafe, call 911. This is what 911 is for. At a minimum, it will generate a police report so there’s a record of the incident in case it escalates.  

3. Report the situation immediately to the delivery company. 

I would add to that: if you order delivery when you’re home alone, opt for the contactless drop off. 

My mother is a reader of this newsletter, so I’ll wrap up by saying: I’m fine! Everything is fine! I haven’t heard from the scammer since that night, and I’m sure whoever it is has moved on to a new target. If there’s a larger lesson of any kind to take away from this experience, it’s that if I had placed my order the old-fashioned way – called the restaurant, and picked it up myself – I might have saved myself a lot of distress. 

Scrambled Prices for Eggs

There’s been mountains of news coverage about the increase in egg prices in recent months, but one thing that’s gone largely unmentioned is how unequal those price increases have been. While the cost of conventional eggs has skyrocketed, prices of cage-free eggs have risen a lot less, while organic and pasture-raised egg prices have been the most stable of all. 

One explanation for the disparity is that conventional eggs – which make up 87 percent of the market – are produced by flocks living in severely crowded barns, making them more vulnerable to outbreaks of avian influenza. When a bird does get sick, tens of thousands of laying hens might need to be euthanized to contain the outbreak.

With cage-free, and to an even greater extent organic and pasture-based production systems, flocks are smaller and less densely crowded, leading to fewer flu outbreaks. To put some numbers to this: in a February earnings call, Vital Farms, a major producer of organic and pastured eggs, said it had found just four positive cases of avian influenza across its 425 farms since 2022. 

But flu losses don’t tell the full story. Recently we learned that the country’s largest egg producer, Cal Maine, more than tripled its profits in 2024. The company has taken advantage of flu-induced disruption caused by the outbreak to gouge consumers. (If you want all the nitty gritty about how price fixing works in conventional egg markets, Claire Kelloway has a detailed breakdown of the greedflation at work here.)  

This sort of profiteering is, of course, maddening to see as a consumer. But the silver lining is that in recent months, the once-substantial gap between the cost of conventional eggs and the fanciest alternatives has narrowed significantly. According to USDA data, this week the average retail price for a dozen conventional eggs was $3.93, compared with $6.49 for organic eggs. In some cases, due to the vagaries of wholesale buying contracts and in-store promotions, you might actually see cage-free and organic eggs being sold for less than their conventional counterparts. Right now, if you can afford them, fancier eggs are the best value, and the smartest buy.

“I fear my baristas have reached mandatory cup-message psychosis.” 

I’ve been keeping a close eye on Starbucks since last summer, when the coffee chain hired in Brian Niccol as its new CEO. Niccol is currently fast food’s golden boy: he transformed Taco Bell to one of the hottest brands in the industry, then swooped into the CEO seat at Chipotle on the heels of its food safety crises and grew the company’s share price by 800 percent. Now Starbucks wants some of that fairy dust. The chain has been struggling to retain customers as its prices have increased, a bloated menu is stretching out wait times, and order-ahead technology has led customers to have a more transactional relationship with the brand. To turn the business around, Niccol will need to pull off a tricky balancing act: both speed up service and recapture that warm, fuzzy coffeehouse vibe that made customers fall in love with Starbucks in the first place. 

Seven months into the job, some of Niccol’s changes have started to take shape. If you’ve noticed that the employees at your local Starbucks now bellow “GOOD MORNING!!” when you walk in the door, and that your coffee cup suddenly features a hand-drawn happy face, it’s not because those baristas were brainwashed by Buddy the Elf. This is all part of the charm offensive being rolled out by Niccol to change customers’ perception of the brand.   

The cup doodles are a clever idea; hand-drawn smiley faces are a quick, easy moment of surprise and delight that might stand out to a customer, without adding much in the way of cost or complexity (Jane reports that her daughter, Lucy, was tickled by the smiley on a recent vanilla latte order). But as Heather Haddon reported this week in The Wall Street Journal, snags with the new corporate edict illustrate how complicated even simple changes become when you have to roll them out across 11,000 coffee shops. Some baristas have drawn stick figures on horseback or gone off-piste with weird, elaborate illustrations (“I fear my baristas have reached mandatory cup-message psychosis,” one customer wrote on Reddit, along with a picture of Starbucks cup featuring a drawing of a horse that gives ‘Monkey Christ’ a run for its money). Others have been pre-decorating cups in batches, killing the whole improvisational charm. Corporate has issued new, stricter cup-art guidance in an attempt to standardize the experience…  

“At 88, a Nutritionist Meets Her Moment”

Earlier this month I wrote a profile for The New York Times of Marion Nestle, a prominent nutritionist and public health advocate who, at 88, is busier and more visible than ever. The piece — surprisingly, the Times’ first profile of this living legend! — focused heavily on Nestle’s opinions about Robert F. Kennedy and the MAHA movement, but my initial interest in writing about her was for a different reason: I’ve been in awe of the impact she’s made during a period of her life when most people have long since retired. Nestle’s status as the nutrition world’s leading public intellectual didn’t come about until she was in her mid-60s; since then she’s written a dozen books and continued teaching and lecturing extensively. And fifty years in the field of nutrition have given her an unusual degree of perspective. When I asked her what she wished more people understood about nutrition, her answer surprised me: “That the most important thing is for you to enjoy what you're eating.”

Something else that ended up on the cutting room floor: I interviewed several of Nestle’s colleagues and contemporaries as part of my research for the story, and was floored by the level of misogyny I encountered in their (on the record!) comments. In response to my question about where the food movement would be today without Nestle’s work, one male friend and colleague responded that if she hadn’t been the one to write “Food Politics” (her seminal work), someone else would have come along and done it. Another claimed Nestle “didn’t really have a science background” (Nestle has a PhD in molecular biology from U.C. Berkeley). A third said she “doesn’t understand how to interpret science.”

In her 2022 memoir, Nestle wrote about how, as one of the only women studying biology at Berkeley in the 1950s, she had to deal with male peers leaving dead rats near her lab equipment. Evidently times haven’t changed all that much.