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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Serve Robotics Strikes Deal With Uber to Scale Up to Two Thousand Sidewalk Delivery Robots

Uber Technologies Inc. is gearing up for a robotic future, bolstering its partnership with Serve Robotics Inc., a maker of sidewalk delivery robots. Following a successful trial in Los Angeles, the companies announced they would deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s delivery robots in multiple markets across the United States. The deal marks one of the largest robotic delivery fleet deployments ever announced.

According to Serve, the expansion follows a year of strong growth, which saw the startup’s robotic deliveries grow 30% month over month since their introduction in 2022. Serve says that they currently serve over 200 Los Angeles restaurants.

“We are thrilled to be growing our partnership with Uber,” said Dr. Ali Kashani, co-founder and CEO of Serve Robotics. “This partnership is a major step towards mass commercialization of robotics for autonomous delivery, and it is a testament to the success of our partnership. We are excited to continue our work with Uber to bring this innovative technology to more cities across the country.”

For Serve, fleet expansion is made easier by the higher utilization of their robots in the field resulting from their fleets serving more than one customer in a given market. In the Los Angeles market, for example, the company’s fleet of about 100 robots delivers for both UberEats and 7-Eleven.

According to the company, they are eyeing San Jose, Dallas and Vancouver for possible expansion and have also started working with Pizza Hut in Vancouver and Walmart in Arkansas.

Long term, it will be interesting to see how cities begin to accommodate growing sidewalk robot traffic. Some cities have banned them, while others have begun to classify them as pedestrians.

Serve Robotics Adds Former GoPro Exec To Lead Development of Autonomous Sidewalk Robots

Serve Robotics has hired Euan Abraham to head up the development of the company’s autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, the company has told The Spoon. Abraham, who in the past led the development of GoPro’s Karma drone and has also had stints leading engineering teams at Apple and smart lock company Otto, will become the company’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering effective January 2022.

The new hire is a sign the company is entering a new phase, according to Serve’s CEO, Ali Kashani, who sat down with The Spoon this week to talk about the hiring of Abraham.

A big focus for Abraham will be to take a company that has primarily been focused early on developing a robot and optimizing its capabilities through its initial trials in West Hollywood to one that can deploy large fleets at scale across multiple markets.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Kashani told The Spoon. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

It’s not just about scaling but getting better, according to Kashani. “It’s easy to get distracted with scale where you lose your innovative edge. We want to continue to iterate on our hardware, and we don’t want to stop here. We want to keep making it better.”

The areas where Kashani thinks Serve can get better are areas where he believes the company already stands out from its peer group, the first of which is autonomy. He says Serve’s robots do most of the driving themselves, which has enabled Serve’s human teleoperators to manage more than one robot at a time.

This high level of autonomy wouldn’t be possible without the Serve’s built-in safety systems, another area where Kashani believes his robots stand out.

“Our robots have a lot of onboard safety mechanisms so that they can be independent. They can be there by themselves.,” Kashani said. “At the same time, they also have people backing them up. So we have the best of both worlds.”

Serve’s other major differentiator isn’t a technical one, but it may be the company’s biggest ace in the hole: its relationship with Uber. Earlier this year, Uber spun out the robot group which it had acquired as part of the Postmates acquisition, and this month, Serve announced that Uber would be the company’s first commercial partner. The two companies plan to roll out a fleet of robots to deliver food to Uber Eats customers across the LA market in 2022.

While Abraham’s hiring is undoubtedly a significant strategic move for the company, Kashani says they aren’t done. With Uber’s rollout of autonomous delivery and Serve eyeing new markets like the Bay area, Kashani says Serve has several areas the company is looking for more talent, including autonomous driving, operations, supply chain, and HR.

“We are always looking for kind of more folks to join,” Kashani said. “It’s a never-ending kind of story.

Food Tech News: Online Food Bank, Upcycled Cacao Fruit Bites, and $10M for Gluten-Free Snack Brand

If you feel like you’ve fallen behind in the fast-paced world of food tech, you’ve come to the right place. In this week’s Food Tech News roundup, we have stories on Feeding America’s new online platform, Costco’s partnership with Uber, a snack brand’s $10 million funding round, and one of the first companies to receive the Upcycled Food Certification.

Food bank launches online grocery ordering for those facing food insecurity

Feeding America is one of the largest food banks in the country, and this week the non-profit began offering online ordering. Called Order Ahead, food is ordered through a Feeding America network food bank or partner food on a smartphone, tablet, or computer. The order can then be picked up at schools, libraries, or a drive-thru distribution center. Certain markets will also be offering home delivery. Those requiring food assistance unfortunately might feel embarrassed or stigmatized, so offering an online platform allows for the option of being more discreet.

CaPao is one of the first companies to receive the Upcycled Food Certification

CaPao has created a snack product that is made from upcycled cacao fruit. The brand was developed in Mondelēz International’s SnackFuture innovation and venture hub, and this week announced that it is one of the first companies to receive the recently launch Upcycled Food Certification. After cacao beans have been extracted from the cacao pod, there is about 70 percent of the pod remaining goes to waste, and this remaining fruit is used in the snack product. CaPao sources this potential food waste from Cabosse Naturals, a food and beverage company that uses cacao pods to make various ingredients. Using the upcycled cacao fruit, CaPao produces three flavors of snack bites: mango cashew coconut, golden berry apricot chia, and cherry almond cocoa. The products are available for purchase on the company’s website and retailers in Southern California.

Photo by Henry & Co. on Unsplash

Costco partners with Uber to trial same-day delivery

Costco is currently trialing same-day grocery delivery with Uber at 25 Texas locations in Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Uber has announced that its drivers will be able to deliver groceries in minutes to a few hours. To use the service trial in Texas, customers must order at least $35 worth of Costco groceries and products. Costo currently also works with Instacart to offer same-day delivery.

Gluten-free snack maker raises $10 million

Quinn produces various gluten-free snacks, and this week the company secured $10 million in its Series B funding round. NewRoad Capital Partners led the round, and Echo Capital, Boulder Food Group, and Sunil Thakor also participated. The capital will be used for product innovation, company growth, and be put towards Quinn’s mission of supporting regenerative agriculture. Quinn uses gluten-free ingredients like sorghum, cassava, and corn for its pretzels sticks and chips, stuffed pretzels, and flavored popcorn. The company provides a map of where its ingredients are sourced and a list of farmers (who are taking steps to reduce their environmental impact) it buys from to provide transparency to consumers. Quinn’s products are available for purchase in approximately 10,000 retailers nationwide.

Uber Expands Grocery Delivery to 400 US Cities, Adds Albertsons Brands as Partners

Uber’s grocery delivery service is now available in more than 400 cities across the U.S., according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The company has also added Albertsons retail brands to its delivery platform.

The move marks a big jump for Uber, which started its grocery delivery business in the U.S. a little more than a year ago, growing it to 100 cities. With today’s expansion, Uber’s grocery delivery will be available in major markets such as Miami, Dallas, New York City, Washington D.C. and for the first time in California by way of San Francisco.

At the same time, Uber also bulked up its retail partnerships with the addition of Albertsons stores to its platforms. Over the course of this year, Uber will roll out delivery to 1,200 Albertsons stores including Albertsons, Safeway, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Tom Thumb, Randalls and more.

Uber got into the grocery delivery game in July of 2020 following its purchase of a majority stake in Latin American online grocery delivery marketplace Cornershop in 2019. Since that time, grocery delivery has seen an explosion in usage, thanks in large part to the pandemic, which makes it an attractive market for a logistics company like Uber. Last month, SEC filings showed that Uber was acquiring the remaining 47 percent of Cornershop.

Unlike the modern ride sharing-business, which Uber basically invented, the company will be facing a lot of competition for your grocery delivery dollar. DoorDash, which started out in restaurant delivery has made its own aggressive moves into grocery delivery and announced its own partnership with Albertsons last month. And of course Uber will be going up against Instacart, the 800-pound gorilla in third-party grocery delivery.

But perhaps the more interesting competition in major cities for Uber will come from the rapidly expanding speedy grocery delivery startups, which promise to get you your groceries in as few as 10 minutes. Services like JOKR and Fridge No More are expanding across New York City. Gorillas is hopping beyond New York and into San Francisco, where Food Rocket also operates.

These services all operate small, delivery-only grocery stores with a limited delivery radius. They are also vertically integrated, controlling their inventory and employing their own drivers. As Food Rocket CEO, Vitaly Alexandrov recently told me, having their own fleet of delivery people gives his company an advantage over services like Uber and Instacart. When an order is placed by the customer, the network doesn’t have to spend time finding a driver who will take the job. There is already a dedicated staffer on hand to make deliveries go out faster.

DoorDash operates its own line of DashMart delivery-only convenience stores, and Instacart is reportedly looking to build out its own automated fulfillment centers. With all this competition, will Uber, which has famously built its empire by emphatically not owning parts of its business like its driver network, need to cave and develop a more owned and operated stack?

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll have to see if Uber customers will even use Uber for grocery delivery on a massive scale.

Is Deliveroo’s IPO a Turning Point for Third-Party Delivery’s Labor Force?

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U.K.-based Deliveroo is the latest third-party delivery service getting ready to debut on the public market, with plans to go public in early April. As usual, the move comes with the standard buffet of controversies surrounding third-party delivery services, particularly those around pay and protections for workers actually doing the last mile of the food delivery. Unlike usual, the labor issue is actually making would-be investors think twice this time.

Six major U.K. investors, including Aberdeen Standard, BMO Global, and Aviva Investors, said last week that they will not participate in Deliveroo’s initial public market, citing working conditions for the delivery service’s couriers and drivers. 

Like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and others, Deliveroo classifies the folks doing the actual food delivery as independent contractors, and therefore isn’t required to offer minimum wage, paid time off, or paid sick leave. As we’ve written ad nauseam, this is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that many workers struggle to make a living wage off these delivery gigs, as evidenced by a recent report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that found some Deliveroo riders earn as little as £2 ($2.76 USD) per hour during a shift.

What’s turning investors off, however, is more than just an ethical issue. Some apparently see a business built on gig workers as a risky model because of the regulatory scrutiny that model is getting of late, at least in the U.K. and in Europe. Case in point: Uber recently lost a fight against the U.K. supreme court and must now classify its drivers as employees, not independent contractors. For now, that doesn’t impact the company’s Eats business, but it’s been enough to, in the words of investment forecasters, “dampen the mood” around Deliveroo’s IPO. 

Deliveroo itself admitted in its investment prospectus that having to reclassify its workers as employees would have a “material impact” on the business. Part of the reason third-party services, including Deliveroo, have been able to achieve such high valuations in the past is because their businesses are built off the idea of minimizing labor costs. Paying drivers a minimum wage and other benefits eats into those costs, and puts the idea of steady profitability further out of reach. Additionally, Deliveroo suggested having to change its worker classifications would also impact its ability to operate in certain markets. 

The chances of Deliveroo having to reclassify its workers seems high. Just Eat Takeaway.com, another major food delivery service in the U.K. and Europe, as already pledged to do away with the gig worker model. The aforementioned Uber fight with the U.K. supreme court also doesn’t bode well for Deliveroo.

What is yet to be determined is whether this will have a ripple effect across the pond. Some recent events, like California passing Prop 22 in November of last year, seem to suggest gig workers are losing the fight against third-party delivery. On the other hand, Just Eat Takeaway.com has plans to acquire U.S.-based Grubhub, which means it may eventually bring its employee-based model Stateside.

Right now there seem to be more questions than answers surrounding the fate of third-party delivery services. But as more countries and governments take a harder stance against the gig-worker model, and as more investors think twice before backing such ventures, we may finally start to see the balance of power start to shift in favor of the folks on whose backs these businesses are actually built.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Starbucks aims to become carbon neutral with its coffee by 2030, the company said this week. The Seattle-based coffee giant says it will do this with things like precision agronomy and climate-resistant coffee plant varieties.

Yum Brands, parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, has acquired omnichannel solutions company Tictuk Technologies. Tictuk is known for its “conversational commerce,” which will allow customers to place food orders via social media, SMS, email, and many other formats. 

Restaurant Group Brinker International this week announced a Google Maps and Google Search integration for the company’s It’s Just Wings virtual brand, in a bid to further digitize the off-premises experience.

Postmates X Spun Out of Uber to Become Serve Robotics

Uber has officially spun out its Postmates X division to become its own standalone company now called Serve Robotics. The news was first reported by TechCrunch and confirms rumblings about such a move reported back in January.

Uber acquired Postmates for $2.65 billion last year, which included the Postmates X robotics unit. The Serve delivery robot is an autonomous cooler-sized rover robot currently making deliveries around the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

According to TechCrunch, Serve Robotics has raised an undisclosed seed round of funding led by the VC firm Neo, with participation from Uber, Lee Jacobs, Long Journey Ventures, Western Technology Investment and other investors. Serve Robotics will be led by Ali Kashani, who headed up Postmates X, will have 60 employees, and will be headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Los Angeles, and Vancouver, Canada.

Delivery robots like Serve are definitely on the rise as a number of startups come to market around the world. In the U.S. Starship, Kiwibot and Refraction all have robots making deliveries. In Russia there’s Yandex, in South Korea there’s Woowa Brothers, and in Turkey there’s Delivers AI. (For more, check out our Delivery Robot Market Report available to our Spoon Plus members.)

With all these robotic solutions plus other autonomous vehicle options, Uber doesn’t need to have its own full-stack robotic delivery solution. As I wrote last month:

“…as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.”

Additionally, spinning off Serve Robotics means that Uber itself does not need to devote resources to figuring out the patchwork of state, county and city laws when it comes to actually getting commercial autonomous delivery vehicles on public sidewalks and streets. The flip side of that however, is that dealing with this patchwork of regulations is something Serve will have to do on its own.

Uber Q4: Delivery Up 150% Year-Over-Year as It Expands Beyond Restaurants

Uber unveiled its earnings this week for the fourth quarter of 2020. Its food delivery business remains the strongest part of the business, a point hardly surprising since we’re still in the midst of a pandemic and restaurant dining rooms remain closed in many places.

A few of the latest stats, according to the company earnings call yesterday, include:

  • Uber reported $3.17 billion in total revenue from October through December, 2020.
  • Q4 gross bookings for delivery grew 128 percent and reached a $44 billion run rate in December.
  • Revenue “more than tripled” from last year and grew 19 percent compared to the third quarter of 2020.

On this week’s call, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also called out Uber’s plans to expand delivery into areas beyond traditional restaurants. “It’s become clear that the pandemic has increased consumers’ appetite for on-demand delivery of not just food, but all goods, and we take a major step to address this enormous opportunity,” he said.

Recent(ish) acquisitions by Uber support that statement. At the end of 2019, the company acquired majority ownership of online grocery Cornershop and in 2020 expanded its grocery delivery services. Uber’s more recent $2.65 billion acquisition of rival service Postmates gives it access to the latter’s delivery-as-a-service business that connects customers with Walmart, 7-Eleven, Apple, and other stores. Just last week, Uber also nabbed alcohol-delivery service Drizly.  

“These new initiatives will remain an investment priority going forward,” Khosrowshahi said on the call.

Overall, Uber’s losses are narrowing. For all of 2020, net losses totaled $6.77 billion, which is a roughly 20 percent improvement from the $8.51 billion in 2019.

Uber Buys Alcohol Delivery Service Drizly for $1.1 Billion

Uber announced today that it is acquiring online alcohol marketplace and delivery service Drizly for roughly $1.1 billion in stock and cash. Prior to the acquisition, Drizly had raised $119.6 million in funding.

According to the press announcement, Drizly operates in more than 1,400 cities across most of the U.S. The company works with thousands of local booze sellers to facilitate orders and delivery of beer, wine and spirits.

Uber said that more than 90 percent of the price paid to Drizly stockholders will be in stock, with the remaining balance paid in cash. Once the acquisition is complete, Drizly will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Uber. Drizly’s marketplace will eventually get integrated into the Uber Eats app and also keep its own titular app.

The move further strengthens Uber’s biggest moneymaker right now — delivery. The pandemic, of course, crushed Uber’s ridesharing business as various states of lockdown/quarantine/movement restrictions negated the ability of people to go anywhere.

But all this quarantining has been a boon for Uber’s food delivery business. In its 2020 Q3 earnings report, Uber said that adjusted net revenue for delivery grew 190 percent year-over-year, hitting $1.14 billion in revenue. As such, the company has spent the past year bolstering delivery, acquiring rival delivery service Postmates for $2.65 billion last summer, and expanding beyond just restaurant food and into grocery delivery.

In addition to eating at home more often, the pandemic, for good or bad, pushed a lot more people into drinking. As of September 2020, Nielesn reported that total sales of alcohol outside bars and restaurants were up 24 percent during the pandemic. At that same time, Drizly told NPR that its sales were up 350 percent year over year.

With the Drizly acquisition, Uber stands to gain in the short term from the continued closure or limited capacity of bars and restaurants across many states. Beyond the immediate closures, since we’ve been dealing with COVID life for practically a year now, new habits have formed including getting alcohol delivered to your door. So getting a bottle of vodka brought to you at home pretty close to on-demand isn’t that strange an idea any longer.

And even though the rates of COVID infections are currently going down in the U.S. and vaccines are being deployed, who knows what going to bars will be like when things return to normal. Will people be skittish to be shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of people yelling for prolonged periods of time? After being cooped up for so long, there’s certainly a pent up desire to do so. But there will also be a desire for smaller, more controllable gatherings at our homes. Gatherings that will definitely need some booze.

Uber Lays Off More Than 180 Employees of Postmates

Uber has laid off about 15 percent, or roughly 185 people, from its Postmates division, according to a report this weekend from the New York Times. The layoffs come just a couple months after Uber completed the $2.65 billion acquisition of the rival delivery service.

The NYT noted that the cuts are part of the integration process of Postmates with Uber Eats. On the front, consumer-facing end, Postmates will still function as its own app, separate from Eats. However, it will now share back-end infrastructure with Eats’ existing technologies and operations.  

Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann is among the individuals that made a decision to depart the company. Other executives “will leave with multimillion exit packages,” according to NYT sources, who added that more exists could be possible in the coming months. 

For now, Eats remains Uber’s key money-making business, having overtaken the company’s ride-hailing service last year in terms of revenues. The pandemic, of course, helped the popularity of the Eats Business as more consumers stayed home and ordered delivery and the restaurant drastically shifted focus to off-premises formats in response.

Because of that shift, food delivery is more popular than ever, and Uber faces significant competition from services like DoorDash, which went public in December, and Grubhub, which was recently snapped up by global delivery service Just Eat Takeaway.com.

To remain competitive, Uber has made a number of cuts in recent months to parts of its business. For example, it got rid of its autonomous vehicle division and is spinning off Postmates’ robotics division into a separate entity.

Update: An earlier version of this story said that Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann was laid off. Lehmann has made the decision to depart the company on his own, according to an Uber spokesperson.

Report: Uber Looking to Spin Off Postmates X Delivery Robot Biz

As part of its acquisition of Postmates last year, Uber got into the delivery robot business. Now, according to a report in TechCrunch, Uber is planning to get out of the robo-biz by spinning off Postmates X (the robotics division of the company) into a separate company.

From TechCrunch:

Postmates X, the robotics division of the on-demand delivery startup that Uber acquired last year for $2.65 billion, is seeking investors in its bid to become a separate company, according to several people familiar with the plans.

The new spinout is being called Serve Robotics, named after the companies’ autonomous, cooler-sized Serve robot, which was making deliveries in Los Angeles throughout much of 2020. More recently, Postmates Serve was enlisted by the Pink Dot market to make deliveries in West Hollywood.

TechCrunch reports that Serve Robotics would retain the IP and assets, and Uber would keep a 25 percent stake in the company.

Given how the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing restaurants and grocers to adopt more contactless delivery methods, it may seem like an odd time for Uber to get out of the delivery robot business.

As we’ve been chronicling, autonomous delivery robots are popping up all over the globe. Starship has been doing deliveries on college campuses for more than a year, and expanded to grocery delivery in Modesto, CA. Kiwibot partnered with the City of San Jose for robot restaurant deliveries there. Then there’s Yandex in Russia, Delivers AI in Turkey, and Woowa Brothers in Seoul, South Korea.

But as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.

While the use of robotics is definitely on the rise around the world, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before they become mainstream. Regulations and production scale are two biggies. Right now there are a patchwork of rules around autonomous delivery that vary from city to city and state to state. Even as those get ironed out, scaling robots to a number where we see them across the country is still a huge undertaking.

Uber pushing those issues off on to a separate company means Uber can focus more on its own delivery and ridesharing businesses. Uber can then just license the robot technology to facilitate its food delivery.

Uber Q3: Delivery Up 190 Percent Year-Over-Year

Uber reported its third-quarter earnings today, and as expected during this ongoing pandemic, the company’s delivery business, which includes Uber Eats continues to be its moneymaker.

Here are the topline Q3 stats:

  • Uber Delivery’s gross bookings grew 135 percent year-over-year, hitting $8.55 billion
  • Delivery’s adjusted net revenue grew 190 percent year-over-year, hitting $1.14 billion in revenue.
  • Restaurant partners on Uber Eats grew by more than 70 percent year-over-year

For comparison, in Q2 of this year, gross bookings for Uber’s delivery business was $6.96 billion.

Adjusted net revenues for Uber’s mobility, which includes its ridesharing business, declined 52 percent year-over-year, to $1.37 billion. Overall, Uber lost $1.09 billion, which is better than the $1.16 billion lost over the same time last year.

That delivery continues to be the main driver (pardon the pun) for Uber isn’t surprising. Though the pandemic flattened a little bit during the three months ending September 30, people just are not traveling as much as they did pre-pandemic. They are, however, getting restaurant delivery to eat at home, which kept Uber Eats busy.

Something to keep an eye for next quarter is whether Uber Eats’ expansion into grocery in Florida, Texas and New York City will have any impact on earnings. It’s been a record-setting year for online grocery, the winter months are just about upon us and the pandemic resurging. Will all these factors make Uber’s nascent entry into the grocery biz pull big numbers?

It should be noted that Uber’s Q3 earnings report is coming out the same week that it won a victory at the ballot box in California. Prop. 22, which Uber backed, was approved by the state, allowing the company to keep its drivers classified as independent contractors and not employees. That means it won’t have to pony up for benefits or other protections. While this is good for the company’s bottom line, Prop. 22 could have more unfortunate results overall.

California Passes Prop. 22, Leaving Gig Workers as Independent Contractors

In a win for third-party delivery services and other big tech companies, California has passed Proposition 22, ensuring gig workers will remain independent contractors rather than employees of these companies.

Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, and other tech companies that use gig workers to fulfill the last mile of food deliveries backed Prop. 22, which is the most expensive ballot-measure campaign in California history.

The measure, a response to California’s Assembly Bill 5, which was signed into law last year, exempts companies from having to actually employ drivers and in doing so pay for healthcare, sick leave, and other benefits.

Uber, DoorDash, and other companies that rely on gig workers have long said that classifying drivers as employees would drastically change the way the companies do business. Less talked about but just as obvious is the point that classifying drivers as employees would undercut delivery and rideshare services’ still-elusive profitability. In August, Uber and Lyft even threatened to pull out of California after a judge ordered the companies to reclassify their employees in keeping with AB 5.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent an email last night thanking drivers, saying, “The future of independent work is more secure because so many drivers like you spoke up,”

Prop 22. opponents, such as labor groups, argue that the measure allows Uber and other tech companies to skirt basic obligations to workers, including minimum wage, health insurance, and paid sick leave. That last item is an especially hot-button issue at a time when COVID-19 cases are on the rise once again.

Gig Workers Rising, which opposed Prop. 22, called the measure “a loss for our democracy that could open the door to other attempts by corps to write their own laws.”