Photo courtesy of ubereats.com
Busy commuters and workers in Washington hitching rides with Uber can now have their cake and eat it too.
Uber’s Aug. 25 launch of UberEATS in Washington, D.C. brings a locally-curated menu to hungry Uber customers in 10 minutes or fewer. By opening the Uber app, customers can simply pick an item from the daily menu and have it delivered to their door during the busy lunch rush from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., normally one of Uber’s slowest periods.
Now in its ninth city, UberEATS is pairing up with two to three local restaurants a day and featuring the best meals they have to offer. The landscape, customers, lunch and overall restaurant scene were a few of the many reasons Uber moved to D.C., UberEATS’s Washington General Manager Brian Gelb said.
Prices range from around $7 to $15 on its daily revolving menu, and customers are able to use the same cashless payment that has been a key component of Uber’s convenience. They can also order multiple meals and split the food just like splitting the fare for a ride. UberEATS typically charges an additional $3 delivery fee. Although exact percentages were not disclosed, both the drivers and the restaurants receive a payment based on the price of the item ordered by customers. The service runs in downtown Washington from Dupont Circle to Capitol Hill.
To curate this uniquely local menu, Gelb said his team studies food trends in Washington as well as the local food scene to try and discover what people are craving.
“We look at restaurants that define the local food scene,” he said. “We really want to bring the best local D.C. flavors to the menu.”
Uber partners not only with brick-and-mortar restaurants, but also with businesses like Mason Dixie Biscuit Co. that don’t have a physical space but operate out of Union Kitchen, a food incubator.
The selective menu helps ensure that the promise of delivery in 10 minutes or fewer is kept. Currently, you cannot make any modifications, adjustments or substitutions to a meal ordered on UberEATS. Some days there are gluten-free and vegetarian options, while other days there are not.
Mark Lyon, an employee at Huron Consulting Group in Washington, has used UberEATS several times already and said he plans on making it part of his regular lunch options. Lyon said he was impressed with the menu because it gave him a chance to try something new that he would not normally be able to try during a rushed lunch break. Although the options don’t entice him every day, the speed and convenience are hard to beat.
It is this speed that separates UberEATS from the many other food delivery systems like Seamless, Postmates and GrubHub.
“I have quite a bit of experience using Seamless and I find this to be superior, mainly because of speed,” Lyon said. “So what you’re really going to get from Uber that would be different from something like Seamless, is you’re going to be getting a curated selection of lunch and you’re going to get it fast.”
Gelb said his team is very selective when picking drivers for UberEATS. These drivers cannot be available for any other service such as UberX while they are driving for UberEATS. The drivers also work with Uber’s extensive logistics team to ensure they are aware of the restaurants, menu and predicted demand for that day ahead of time.
Drivers go through extensive training to make sure the food is able to withstand the conditions in the trunk of an Uber car and still arrive to the customer looking and tasting as it would if they had ordered it from the restaurant themselves.
“We rigorously test every food item we deliver before it ever gets released to any consumers,” Gelb said. “We work with the restaurants in advance to figure out how to properly package their item and how to make sure it’s at the right temperature and that we follow all of the U.S. federal guidelines to make sure that the food is being kept at that temperature.”
Standards are everything to the many participating restaurants who put the image of their brands into the hands of another company. Sam Blum, community manager at &pizza, a participating restaurant, said so far his team has been pleased and impressed by Uber’s quality control when handling their pizzas. The team ordered their pizza from UberEATS themselves as well as monitored social media to ensure customers were happy with the way their pizza was delivered.
Beyond just convenience, the &pizza team saw UberEATS as a chance to give their customers a unique way to experience their brand outside of the restaurant, as well as expand &pizza’s presence in the Washington community.
“Our hope with UberEATS is that for a lot of these people, maybe it’s their first time trying our pizza and they like it enough to look us up and give one of our restaurants a try,” he said. “It’s ultimately bringing more awareness to our brand.”
Now in their third week of business, Gelb said the customer response to UberEATS has been “overwhelmingly positive,” and it already has plans to expand menu options and locations.
However, with a larger menu comes larger risks. Right now, the small menu selection allows Uber to minimize food waste. It tries to work closely with restaurants to make only as much food as is needed every day, but it cannot always be predicted correctly.
“If there is leftover food at the end of the day, we actually have to comply with all U.S. federal food safety standards, which allow us to only keep food for so long,” Gelb said. “Typically there aren’t leftovers, but if there are minimal leftovers we do typically have to dispose of them.”
Although it is still early on, Blum said his team is excited about the future partnership with UberEATS.
“The fact that Uber is able to bring together some really prominent restaurant brands and deliver them to people in a whole new way has been an exciting thing for us, it’s one of those other cool things happening in D.C.,” he said.
