Restaurant Marketing and Delivery Association wants to challenge Silicon Valley’s dominance in food delivery and bring down costs with an online system built by Conshohocken-based Zuppler, writes Joseph N. DiStefano for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Zuppler is building out our platform for our new website, LocalDelivery.org,” said Andrew Simmons, head of the Texas-based national group.

The site is scheduled to go live mid-June or whenever enough restaurants and delivery services have signed up to make it viable. Consumers will order food through the app.

Offering local services can cut online ordering and delivery charges in half in some cases, which makes it easier for restaurants to absorb the 50-cents-per-order system fee set up by Zuppler. The system will also provide users with local humans they can call when a problem arises.

The big food-delivery services “charge a lot of money, but there’s no local ownership when issues come up,” said Simmons.

The app will also help local delivery services which have so far lacked the speedy software that restaurants and patrons have come to expect in the smartphone era.

And as a bonus, with Zuppler’s new platform, “the money remains in the community,” said Simmons.

Read more about Zuppler in The Philadelphia Inquirer.