Uber Trials Fast Food Delivery Service ‘UberFRESH’

Reading Jay McGregor’s article this morning in Forbes (pasted below) made me think about the impact Uber could have on the restaurant industry with UbereFRESH.  They certainly brought disruption to the taxi industry.  Delivering food from your favorite restaurants in under 10 minutes with no delivery fee certainly has the potential to shake things up – especially to the lunch catering segment of the business.  It would open up huge opportunities for restaurants to develop and grow lunch catering.

Jay McGregorContributor Forbes

Taxi service Uber has moved into the fast-food delivery industry with its new service “UberFRESH”, which it claims will deliver meals from local restaurants in under 10 minutes.

The news comes from Uber’s official blog, which states that the new service will only be available in Santa Monica between Tuesday 26th August and Friday 5th September.

Anyone in that area will be able to order lunch between 11:30am and 2:30pm from a selection of popular local eateries. Customers will be able to chose from one item per day – two salads, a sub and a chicken soup – which cost $12 each and come with a free cookie.

Uber isn’t taking on a fleet of new moped-driving staff for the service. Instead it’s going to use its taxi drivers  to relay the food between restaurant and customer. There will also be no extra delivery cost but drivers won’t leave their car to hand over the food, customers will have to collect it from the street.

If the service is popular, Uber will expand it to other areas. As the blog explains: “While uberFRESH is a limited duration and location experiment this week, depending on the results we look forward to expanding uberFRESH throughout the southland.”

Uber expansion

Uber is looking to rapidly expand both its taxi service to new territories but also its alternative revenue streams, such as UberFRESH. Other services like Uber Movers (for moving home) and UberRUSH (an NYC-based bike courier) have been launched by the taxi-app company in recent years.

Uber also recently trialled its Corner Store service in Washington D.C, which allowed customers to order household items and have them delivered on the same day.

Corner Store is largely similar to UberFRESH in that customers select a driver that’s available in their location and select from a list of 100 items. This puts Uber it in direct competition with similar same-day delivery services from Amazon and Google GOOGL -0.22%, the latter being one of its key investors.