Our Story

The beginnings of dumpling started with our original focus on building a community for workers to share their voice and promote positive change at their workplace. The voices of thousands of independent contractors in the Gig Economy quickly jumped out and grabbed our attention.

While on-demand apps like Instacart and Uber have quickly grown in popularity and success, the experience and day to day realities of the workers that make these apps and services so successful is quite the opposite.

Many of the independent contractors that we talked to loved their jobs but absolutely hated the way they were being treated by the on-demand apps they worked for (check out an article we wrote about Instacart here). Many were considering starting their own businesses to allow them to keep doing the type of work they love and to also get out from the horrible working conditions that they were experiencing.
The challenge they were facing: how to build the technology that’s required for them to create a business in today’s on-demand economy.

That’s where we stepped in. Could we create a business and technology platform that provides everything an independent contractor needed to run their own business? As shoppers from Instacart were experiencing some of the harshest realities of working for an on-demand app, we decided to start there.

We are currently focused on providing the best tools that personal shoppers need to create local businesses that compete with the national grocery delivery apps. With dumpling, shoppers can provide a number of benefits over the status quo; including the ability to shop at any store (think local!), clients getting the same shopper every time (think personalized service!), and in-store pricing with no hidden markups (think savings!).