New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to announce that food delivery platform HungryPanda has agreed to pay more than $875,000 to restaurants and the city after an investigation found the company had illegally overcharged hundreds of restaurants for delivering meals.
The settlement will be announced by the mayor and a bevy of city officials at the red panda exhibit at the Prospect Park Zoo Wednesday morning. A Department of Consumer and Worker Protection probe found that HungryPanda “systemically” overcharged restaurants using tactics like mischaracterizing illegal overcharges, frequently relabeling charges and bundling multiple fees into a single item, according to DCWP. This occurred between January 2022 and September 2024 – when pandemic-era rules capped fees at 23% – and again before June 30, 2025 when the cap was lifted to the current 43%, according to the consent order DCWP shared with City & State. Many of the impacted restaurants were owned by immigrant New Yorkers.
HungryPanda did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication.
“HungryPanda counted on these restaurant owners being too small and too busy to fight back,” Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su said in a statement. “They were wrong. This settlement puts money back in the pockets of hundreds of immigrant-owned businesses, and it’s a clear message to every platform in this city: we are watching the fine print.”
HungryPanda itself has nothing to do with the announcement’s location at the Prospect Park Zoo’s red panda enclosure – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the company’s name. The food delivery platform is particularly massive in Asia, though it’s popular in New York City within the city’s Asian immigrant communities.
It’s not the first time the company has been subject to enforcement from DCWP. About a month into the Mamdani administration, the worker protection agency announced a $5 million settlement with HungryPanda, Uber Eats and Fantuan to resolve violations of the city’s minimum pay standards for delivery workers. While the bulk of that was paid by Uber Eats, the agency ordered HungryPanda to repay a little over $1 million to more than 1,000 workers.
Under the latest settlement, the company will pay more than 380 restaurants more than $580,000 and over $294,000 in civil penalties and fees.
