Fancy a kale caesar salad? Call an Uber.
The fast-growing and controversial taxi app on Tuesday launched its UberEats food delivery service in New York City and Chicago.
Peckish customers in selected areas of the cities can now order lunch – which the company promises will arrive in less than 10 minutes – instead of a ride.
But the menu choice is somewhat limited, with only two dishes offered at time: for lunch on Tuesday customers can choose between a pastrami sandwich or a spring salad from American Cut steakhouse in Tribeca. Customers will also have to be located between 14th and 40th streets, the only area covered by the UberEats service. Orders are only accepted between 11am-2pm.
Later in the week, Uber is promises to offer “kale caesar salad from sweetgreen, steak sandwich from Num Pang, and more”. In Chicago the company will deliver the pepito torta from Xoco, carne asada cemita from Cemitas and more.
Dishes cost $9-$13, plus a $4 delivery fee. The service is already offered in Los Angeles and Barcelona.
“Starting this week, the on-demand meal delivery service that piloted in LA and Barcelona will launch in Chicago and New York City,” the company said in a blogpost. “Now people with the Uber app in all four cities can get food from the most popular, iconic restaurants delivered within minutes.”
Analysts expect food delivery to be the first of several new services Uber will launch in coming months in attempt to justify the sky-high valuation placed on the company at its latest venture capital funding drive in December.
Douglas McCabe from Enders Analysis said: “Relatively small deliveries make a lot of sense. It’s the same model as delivering a person. Not least, there is probably spare vehicle capacity during the day. But Uber’s ambitions might be beyond that: you can envisage the strategy paper that shows how they ultimately aim to replace the private car in cities and, arguably, public transport.”
Competition in the New York food delivery business, which has mostly been controlled by Seamless and GrubHub, hotted up on Tuesday when Momofuku’s David Chang launched Maple – another food delivery app, but one that doesn’t bother to have a restaurant, just a kitchen in the financial district.
Maple was only offering three dishes on Tuesday: spicy shrimp stew, roasted beet and avocado salad and flank steak tacos. Lunch costs $12, dinner $15.
The service is only available south of Chambers Street, because it says it wants the meals to arrive hot within a five-minute bike ride of its kitchen. It plans to open satellite kitchens throughout the city.
Maple, which has attracted $22m series A investment last month, said it was “merging the kitchen-savvy of New York’s top chefs with the expertise of process-driven technologists”. We’ve got no idea what that means either.
