UberEATS sets to expand
Uber has announced that it is set to expand its UberEATS restaurant delivery service. The company has also decided to spin UberEATS off from the main ride-hailing app and make it available as a standalone on iOS and Android.
In a notice posted on its official blog yesterday (15 March), Uber announced: “Now, food lovers in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto can order from their favorite local restaurants, seven days a week, day and night. And Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. are just around the corner.”
The UberEATS service started up on a pilot basis about 18 months ago. The decision to ramp up the service now is an interesting one. While Uber’s marketing people were getting ready to hit the button on the UberEATS expansion announcement yesterday, San Francisco-based SpoonRocket was calling time on its meal delivery service and Delivery Hero revealed that it was closing down its logistic platform Valk Fleet and concentrating all delivery related operations at foodora.
The meal delivery market is brimming with specialist start-up companies, who typically use “crowd sourcing” to build up their networks of contractor drivers. And then we have the two giants who are muscling their way into the sector: Uber and Amazon.
US sources report that UberEATS delivery times tend to beat Amazon Prime Now Restaurants by quite a wide margin. The same sources also say that UberEATS drivers generally tend to make “curbside” deliveries rather than actually bringing the food to the door, which is the norm for most food delivery specialists.
