DoorDash, a food delivery service, was launched in the Bay Area of California.

The food delivery giant DoorDash is planning an expansion on the coast, with online job listings for drivers on both sides of the Columbia River and several local business owners who said they’ve been contacted.

Cat McCormack, a spokeswoman for DoorDash, confirmed the service will debut in the region during the first half of the year.

The owners of Astoria Coffeehouse & Bistro, Good to Go in Astoria and the Tres Bro’s Nicaraguan food truck in Warrenton said they have been contacted by the company. DoorDash has online ads for drivers — known as Dashers — throughout the North Coast and Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state.

Joshua Colby, who owns Tres Bro’s, said a representative from the company approached him about a week ago looking for regional accounts. He had already signed up with Slurpalicious, a locally based online ordering platform that began food deliveries Friday.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to support Slurpalicious at first and give them a good running start before we support the big guy,” Colby said.

Heidi Dlubac, co-owner of Good to Go, said she was approached about joining DoorDash. She said Good to Go’s smaller amount of products makes preparing for both walk-ins and deliveries difficult, but she too would like to support Slurpalicious first.

Portland couple Akshay Dua and Candy Yiu own Near the Pier Guesthouse in Astoria and the restaurant Malka in Portland. They started Slurpalicious over the summer to provide what they describe as a cheaper alternative to DoorDash for restaurants wanting delivery.

Slurpalicious has signed up around 10 eateries for its delivery service so far. Most are food carts. But the service has added some brick-and-mortar restaurants like Bridgewater Bistro, Nekst, the Riverwalk Restaurant and A-Town Coffee.

Slurpalicious charges a 10% commission on deliveries to restaurants, capping fees at $50 a month. Customers will pay another 7% of the order value, plus a $2 fee and 70 cents per mile to drivers. Multiple customers can share the mileage fee if they batch orders within a certain time slot, and will reserve the first $5 in tips for the driver.

Dua said Slurpalicious’s goal is to make the service fairly priced for both drivers and customers. “I think, compared to DoorDash, we’ll still be cheaper,” he said.

The couple plan to use Astoria as a proving ground, learning the food delivery business and spreading farther across the North Coast before launching in Portland and directly competing with larger companies like DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats.

“I’m definitely worried, because also we are not proven players in the field,” Dua said. “So we just need to launch and see what happens.”

The food delivery business has ballooned amid restaurant restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic and changing consumer behavior.

DoorDash, launched by a group of college students in Palo Alto, California, in 2013, was listed on the stock market in December with an initial valuation of $39 billion. Second Measure, a consumer analytics firm, said DoorDash accounted for more than half of all U.S. meal delivery transactions in December.