Uber Eats Picks Up Its Own Restaurant, Ando

When you’re a company focused on delivery, sometimes it’s not a bad idea to control at least some of the supply while you’re at it. It helps focus efforts and cut down on wait times. For Uber Eats, that’s just what happened recently as the company picked up Ando, a delivery-only restaurant in New York that should help the company smooth out some of its delivery time.

Founded by David Chang, former chef at Momofuku, Ando had been working with Uber Eats for some time as a delivery-only operation. It also had its own delivery operations in place along with its own staff. With the new deal in place, Ando is shutting down its own services to become part of the Uber Eats operation. The company made it clear that both its online and Union Square operations would be shuttered as it began “…immediately starting to integrate with Uber Eats.”

No one knows, as yet, just what that means, as Ando hasn’t exactly defined its new role. Also not defined was how much Ando sold for; it was known that the restaurant had raised $7 million following its term with the Expa incubator, so that’s likely to be at least a floor price.

Uber Eats, meanwhile, was set to clear over $3 billion in gross sales with the end of 2017, and has over two million drivers worldwide, making it a potential winner in the delivery front.

This move seems spectacularly risky for Uber Eats. It’s basically bought into an operation that has tons of competition, much of which it will actually be enabling by serving as the delivery arm. While this isn’t the first time a model like this has worked—Netflix makes original content alongside the third-party content that it delivers—it wouldn’t be a leap too far to say the restaurant market is somewhat different. A person can watch several different shows a day; they can only eat so much.

This move could work out, particularly if it starts offering some real original content in its food choices. It could also backfire spectacularly, and only time will tell just which comes to be.