Uber Targets Huge Slice of Food Delivery Market

Having just recently heard from Postmates, who now have access to about 60 percent of American households, it’s clear that Uber is not to be denied here. Uber Eats, the food-delivery arm of Uber, already covers over 50 percent of the US, but by the end of this year, Uber plans to ramp that up to 70 percent, thus out-covering Postmates by a healthy margin.

Uber has actually discovered that Uber Eats is a popular addition to even towns that Uber itself either doesn’t operate or only has a small presence. That lead Uber Eats’ head of US cities Ana Mahoney to note that Uber has actually been able to introduce the ride-sharing concept through the food delivery concept. Forty percent of Eats customers have never used any kind of Uber service before now, which makes Uber Eats an excellent brand ambassador.

In fact, Uber Eats was actually considered the fastest-growing meal delivery service the US had to offer, according to reports from April. It was a match for Grubhub in new customer revenue, and customers in nine of the 22 most populated US cities saw more customers spending on Uber Eats than any other service.

Uber Eats is looking to make it easier for restaurants to get in on the Uber Eats process with self-service sign-up processes. Toss in Uber’s plans to put drones to work by 2021 in food delivery and that might open the geography up even further.

If Uber Eats can keep adding restaurants, territories and features at this rate, there’s no reason they shouldn’t hit their 70 percent target . Some might wonder why not a 100 percent target, but the United States has a surprisingly large amount of mostly-empty space to consider. When you’re dealing with population densities of two people or so per square mile, you can’t just throw them on the list. Still, for most of us, we should have Uber Eats service available in at least the near-term future.

For those of us who’d like to eat something nicer than a burger every so often but don’t want to drive an hour one way to do it, this is the most welcome of developments. I look forward to the day when food-carrying drones arrive on my lawn.