Uber is acquiring the remaining 47 percent in grocery delivery service Cornershop, according to Uber’s most recent 8-K filing, released at the end of last week. The all-stock transaction is expected to close next month.
The deal follows Uber’s acquisition in 2019 of a majority stake in Chile-based Cornershop. At the time, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had already said grocery was an area he wanted to see his company delve deeper into. One pandemic and nearly two years later, the company has done just that. In April of 2020, the company expanded its grocery delivery service to international locations, including a partnership with Carrefour in France. In July of 2020, Uber launched grocery delivery via Cornershop in Canada and Latin America as well as parts of the U.S. Separate from Cornershop, Uber also expanded its grocery service into Manhattan.
Uber’s grocery service expansion has come amid record levels of online grocery shopping in the wake of the pandemic. While numbers have leveled off somewhat since the height of lockdowns in the U.S., stats nonetheless highlight grocery e-commerce’s continued popularity. For example, Brick Meets Click data showed that online grocery sales for pickup or delivery were $6.6 billion in April of this year. That’s down from the $7.1 billion in grocery e-commerce sales in March of this year, but up from $5.3 billion in April 2020.
Restaurants, meanwhile, are opening back up to increasing levels of foot traffic and enthusiasm on the part of consumers for dining out. Those factors could bring restaurant deliveries via Uber Eats and others slightly down in the coming months. Additionally, some restaurants, now back open at full capacity, are dropping the delivery apps they relied on over the last year, having finally had enough of the high commission fees these services charge restaurants. Though some delivery services have responded with tiered pricing models for those commission fees, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and others have long known they need to diversify in order to stay on the path to that elusive profitability.
And speaking of DoorDash, it too had an announcement this week around grocery. The company announced a partnership with grocery chain Albertsons to offer same-day delivery from about 2,000 stores. The deal includes Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco stores. The service will be powered by DoorDash Drive, the company’s white-label platform.
