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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Uber Eats

Delivery Giants DoorDash and Uber Eats Join The Rush to Integrate AI Into Ordering Platforms

Over the last six months, we’ve watched as seemingly every quick-service restaurant chain jumped on the AI freight train, integrating new generative AI technology into apps, chatbots, and voice ordering tools to expedite the customer experience.

Now, it looks like food-ordering platforms DoorDash and Uber Eats are taking their turn to roll out AI tools.

This week we learned of DoorDash’s AI-powered voice ordering, which the company is rolling out as part of its merchant solutions portfolio. At first available in select markets, the new AI voice agents will be the first point of contact for restaurants leveraging DoorDash’s white-label voice-order platform. The company says AI voice ordering can take orders in different languages.

The AI will be trained on each operator’s menu and make personalized upsell recommendations. DoorDash makes clear that live human agents will be standing by to jump in if additional support is needed.

And, courtesy of Bloomberg, we also learned this week that Uber Eats is working on a new AI-powered chatbot for its food-ordering app. Techcrunch writes the new AI chatbot will ask users about food budgets and preferences and help them place an order. The Uber Eats AI chatbot news comes a month after DoorDash confirmed it is also working on an AI chatbot.

The news of AI-powered tools by the two delivery giants comes after a string of AI rollouts on the quick service front. This spring, Wendy’s announced it was working with Google to develop an AI for its drive-thru called FreshAI, and early this month, White Castle announced it was working with SoundHound to develop a drive-thru AI.

As I mentioned in my writeup of the food AI workshop ethics workshop, one of the first areas I expect to see AI and automation impact food is on the front lines of quick service. The historically low pay and high turnover for these jobs make them low-hanging fruit when it comes to AI tool integration, particularly for order taking, which is often the biggest bottleneck and the most easily automated part of the entire food purchase process.

We’ll be talking AI and how it will change the restaurant business at our Food AI Summit on Oct 25th in Alameda. Get your ticket today to join the conversation!

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.

Uber Eats and Motional to Provide Driverless Food Delivery in 2022

Food delivery platform Uber Eats and driverless technology company Motional announced last week that they are partnering to pilot autonomous food deliveries. The companies plan to launch this service in Santa Monica, California, in early 2022.

The delivery vehicle provided and operated by Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, is the fully electric Hyundai IONIQ 5-based robotaxi. The scope of the autonomous delivery service will be small to start; the electric vehicles will only deliver curated meal kits from select restaurants in Santa Monica on Uber Eats.

The design of Uber Eats drone in 2019.

Although this is Uber Eat’s first attempt at developing driverless car delivery, the company actually experimented with drone delivery in 2019. The design, which included six rotors, was unveiled at the Forbes Under 30 Summit with the intention of testing it out in San Diego in 2020. The drone could apparently carry a dinner for two and had a round trip range of 12 miles. However, since the announcement in 2019, we haven’t heard any other news about the delivery drones.

Uber Eats is certainly not the only company that has taken a stab at autonomous food delivery. In 2018, Postmates (which was acquired by Uber Eats) introduced Postmates Serve, an autonomous sidewalk delivery robot and associated food delivery service platform, which has been running pilot trials in Hollywood. During summer 2021, Grubhub and Yandex announced that they would be bringing food delivery robots to college campuses. Earlier this month, 7-Eleven and Nuro announced a partnership to pilot autonomous food deliveries in Mountain View, California.

Autonomous delivery offers several benefits, including reduced delivery fees for customers and restaurants and minimal human contact. Third-party delivery services were in high demand after the start of the pandemic, and seeing that we are still not out of it, food delivery will likely continue to be a popular choice for customers staying home.

As cool as driverless and drone delivery sounds, there has yet to be a company that has really put its concept into action, especially on a large scale. Several companies have now had the chance to pilot their concepts for a few months to a few years, so maybe, 2022 will be the year we see a wider implementation of this tech.

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.

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.

DoorDash Expands to Japan

DoorDash today announced the official launch of its delivery service in Japan. This is the San Francisco-based company’s first foray into the Asia market, and its third international expansion after Canada and Australia. 

Service begins today in Sendai, a city with just over 1 million inhabitants in the northeastern part of Japan. The choice of location is in keeping with DoorDash’s strategy elsewhere, which is to focus on smaller cities and suburban markets over major metropolises. Historically, this has helped DoorDash reach customers normally outside most restaurants’ delivery ranges, and it’s arguably a factor that has kept DoorDash in the top spot for marketshare, at least here in the U.S.

Whether the company can repeat that success in Japan remains to be seen. Japan is a restaurant-dense country, which means plenty of prospective DoorDash merchants and customers. However, the country is also home to a lot of competition in the delivery space, including major services like Uber Eats and Delivery Hero.

DoorDash, meanwhile, has recently added services like grocery and convenience store delivery as a way of reaching new customer types and also standing out from the competition. (Uber also offers grocery delivery in some U.S. locations.) The company has not yet said if these services will be immediately part of its expansion to Japan. 

DoorDash went public at the end of 2020. Last month, the company reported revenues of $1.08 billion for the first quarter of 2021, up from $362 million in the previous year and beating out Wall Street estimates.

Restaurants in Sendai will also be able to use DoorDash’s Storefront feature, which lets businesses process orders and payments directly, rather than going through the marketplace. 

Online Grocer Cropswap Launches New Feature to Help Food Insecure Families

“Farm-to-phone” grocery platform Cropswap today announced a partnership with Nourish LA to bring healthier food donations to underserved residents of Los Angeles.

Food insecurity, which the USDA defines as “the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways,” has increased over the last year. Los Angeles county alone estimates that “nearly 1 in 4 residents” in that county has suffered food insecurity since the COVID-19 pandemic started. 

Cropswap, which launched during the pandemic, connects its users with local farmers via an app. In June of last year, the company also launched a subscription service through which customers can get delivery or pickup orders of produce, seeds, and other items on a regular basis. 

For the Nourish LA partnership, Cropswap as added an in-app donation feature that lets users give a seasonal Harvest Box to those in need for $50. The box is filled with organic produce from Sow a Heart Farm, in Fillmore, California, and contains what Cropswap says is enough to sustain a family for one week. Users can simply add the donation to their existing total. Cropswap and Nourish LA handle the actual process of getting the food to its recipients. 

Given that they’re a relatively easy way to encourage giving, in-app donation buttons have surfaced in multiple different areas of the food industry over the last twelve months. Uber Eats last year set up an in-app donation button to help struggling independent restaurants. Also last year, Delivery Hero partnered with the United Nation’s World Food Programme’s Share the Meal program. Users can donate a meal via the regular Delivery Hero app interface.

A $50 box of food is obviously more costly for the giver than, say, donating a few bucks or a single meal. However, online grocery has seen a surge in new users over the last year, and consumer enthusiasm for buying from local farms has also increased. Those two factors working together means there’s a much bigger potential audience for Cropswap’s self-proclaimed “Instacart for local produce.” That in turn means a wider pool of those able to and/or willing to donate a week’s worth of food to those in need.

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 Eats Launches Campaign to Support Independent Restaurants

Uber today announced Eat Local, a campaign the company says will support independent restaurants financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As part of the Eat Local package, Uber will donate $4.5 million to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which will in turn distribute financial assistance to U.S. restaurants facing COVID-19-related challenges. Restaurants must be on the Uber Eats and/or Postmates platforms to be eligible. 

According to the LISC website, the applications process for grants opens on Feb. 16. The grant program will offer to help restaurants meet certain expenses, such as payroll, rent, utilities, outstanding debts to vendors, and upgrading technology systems. 

Restaurants must have been active on Uber Eats or Postmates since Jan. 1, 2021 in order to be eligible for the grant. Businesses must also have less than five locations and not be affiliated with a national brand. (The full list of eligibility requirements is on LISC’s site.)

In keeping with earlier relief efforts from 2020, Uber’s Eat Local package also includes waived and reduced fees for restaurants around restaurant pickup orders and for orders placed via a restaurant’s own website but delivered by Uber Eats. Restaurants can get daily payouts instead of the standard weekly ones, and Uber will also continue matching donations made by customers via the Eats app’s Restaurant Contribution feature.

Uber (and newly acquired Postmates) along with Grubhub and DoorDash first began offering relief packages for restaurants back in March 2020, when shelter-in-place mandates first went into effect in the U.S. Since then, these services have launched various grant programs and assistance efforts, including Grubhub’s Winterization Grant and DoorDash’s ongoing Main Street Strong program.

All of these efforts go some ways towards helping small and independent restaurants, which have been most damaged by the pandemic. What remains unclear is how much grants and relief efforts help when stacked up against the high commission fees third-party delivery service continue to charge these smaller restaurants. That factor remains likely to be a point of heated debate long after the worst parts of the pandemic have subsided.

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.

DoorDash Files for IPO, Could Start Trading in December

DoorDash unveiled its public S-1 filing this morning after confidentially filing to go public earlier this year. The San Francisco-based third-party delivery service is expected to begin trading on the NYSE in mid-December.

Reports of the service going public as soon as 2020 first surfaced in August, along with hints that the company was trekking towards actual profitability, which is still something of an elusive concept in the world of third-party delivery. Today’s unveil of DoorDash’s S-1 filing shows that the company reported a profit for the first time in its history during the second quarter of 2020. The company garnered $675 million in revenue and a profit of $23 million for Q2 2020. The company posted a net loss of $43 million for Q3, but still reported revenue growth of $879 million and has ample cash to fund itself — $1.6 billion, to be exact, though DoorDash has said COVID-related lockdowns played a significant role in its growth and that growth rates in revenue could decline in future.

DoorDash’s forthcoming IPO arrives at a time when demand for food delivery apps is thriving. Data from September shows that sales for these services grew 125 percent year-over-year during that month. DoorDash earned almost half, or 49 percent, of those sales — a significantly higher number than the 22 percent of Uber Eats or the 20 percent of Grubhub.

Restaurant delivery remains the biggest slice of DoorDash’s business, but it’s no longer the only one. Perhaps because of the uncertainty of the current restaurant industry, the company branched out into grocery and convenience store delivery this year, too. It even went as far as opening its own “ghost convenience store” facility in August.

Though all this cash and profitability comes at a cost of its own, a human cost in this case. DoorDash helped bankroll Prop 22, which California voters just passed and which allows third-party delivery services to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors. In other words, they’re saving a lot of money by not shelling out for benefits like workers comp, health care, and paid sick leave. The company also remains steeped in controversy around the high commission fees it extracts from restaurants at a time when businesses are shuttering in record numbers because of the pandemic. 

Unfortunately, money usually talks louder than any other issue on the table. DoorDash’s filing today shows that despite these controversies, the company’s growth is unlikely to slow any time soon. 

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.