Uber is currently battling several demons and now seems to be facing difficulties on the delivery front as well. Uber is looking to close its UberRush logistics and courier service for restaurants and cafes in the coming weeks, on May 8, reports Quartz. Instead, the ride-hailing giant is directing them to join its recently launched food delivery initiative — UberEATS.
For those unaware, UberRush was born out of CEO Travis Kalanick’s remark that if his ride-hailing company can deliver a car to your doorstep in just five minutes then it can surely deliver anything — be it food, flowers, cakes or other supplies. Uber debuted the service in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco way back in October 2015.
This was seen as a significant addition to the company’s overall transportation portfolio, which already included rides and delivery of meals. Its clientele, as well as partnerships mostly consisted of restaurants, which made the service competitive against startups such as Postmates, Grubhub, and other on-demand food delivery services. UberRush had signed up Blockheads, a New York burrito chain; Delivery.com, an online order-anything platform; and BloomNet, a flower delivery service.
But, as Quartz reports, Uber has emailed its Rush partners saying it will be putting an end to restaurant deliveries on the platform on May 8th. They’ve been encouraged to move to UberEATS, as mentioned above, even though such food deliveries made for a majority of orders on Rush, suggest two former Uber employees aware of the development. An Uber spokesperson has confirmed the change and described the ideology behind the same as under:
We built UberEats to specifically meet the needs and support the growth of our individual restaurant partners. Moving forward, we will focus UberRush on powering backend delivery logistics for merchants and enterprises such as grocery stores and florists.
This restructuring of delivery operations under UberRush and UberEATS can be seen as a process to streamline overall operations both on the delivery, as well as the ride-hailing front. The two aforementioned services rely on the same pool of Uber drivers who’re driving passengers to and fro in the city.
So, when the number of food delivery requests increase during peak hours, such as lunch and dinner, most of the UberX drivers run after such orders. This creates a shortage of drivers for ferrying passengers, thus causing the surge pricing (which is now upfront) to kick in. Thus, Uber is looking to segregate the delivery operations to not jeopardize the passenger operations — who had to pay extra due to a shortage of drivers.
We’ve contacted Uber for more information and will update you once we receive a reply.
As for UberEATS, which the ride-hailing plans to push to the forefront with this change, was first launched back in August 2014. Yeah, it is older than UberRush and was formerly known as UberFRESH. It was operational from within the Uber app but received its own separate app when it was revamped into UberEATS in 2015. The ride-hailing giant has since been expanding the reach of the platform beyond the States.
UberEATS currently has over 5 million downloads on Google Play Store and is operational in over 65 cities, as of March 2017. Now, it has not only found its way into Barcelona, New York, and Chicago but has also launched in its very first Asian country — Singapore as well. Evan Graj, the founder of Dine In, a London-based food delivery startup, has been appointed as General Manager of UberEATs Singapore to take on its rivals in the nation.
But, there has recently also been speculation that the company is planning to step foot in the ever competitive market of India. It has been reported that UberEATS could launch in India very soon and is currently exploring partnerships with a cohort of food joints to expand its network before launch.
