• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

UberEATS Creates “Virtual Restaurants” to Fill Culinary Voids

by Chris Albrecht
November 10, 2017November 11, 2017Filed under:
  • Delivery & Commerce
  • Restaurant Tech
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

We’ve talked before about virtual reality coming to restaurants and possibly training robots to be chefs, but now there’s word that UberEATS is creating entire “virtual restaurants” that exist only inside their app, but serve very real food.

We came across this story via TechCrunch today, but Restaurant Hospitality wrote about it last month.

Here’s the concept in a nutshell. UberEATS sees what foods people in specific neighborhoods are searching for. If that food isn’t served in an area, Uber will approach an existing restaurant and see if they want to serve the missing cuisine. If that establishment agrees, Uber builds a virtual restaurant in its app that people can order from.

The example from Restaurant Hospitality is a Chicago pizza place that created a whole other chicken restaurant that exists only on UberEATS. It uses the same fryers it already had in the pizzeria kitchen, and now does $1,000 worth of chicken sales each week.

It’s easy to see how this could drastically change how a restaurant does business. With a virtual restaurant, they can easily test menu items or whole new cuisine concepts without having to build or invest in a real world presence.

That’s not to say that every virtual restaurant concept will work. An example Uber gave to TechCrunch is the ability for a restaurant to add a Mexican virtual offering. It seems a bit dismissive to think that just any restaurant could shift to Mexican food. It’s easy to see the reach of some greedy restaurants exceeding their grasp. Though, with UberEATS’ new five star rating system, the market will hopefully weed out poseurs quickly.

UberEATS is currently in 130 cities and works with 65,000 restaurants around the world. But now will it spawn 65 milllion virtual ones?


Related

Get the Spoon in your inbox

Just enter your email and we’ll take care of the rest:

Find us on some of these other platforms:

  • Apple Podcasts
  • Spotify
Tagged:
  • UberEats
  • Virtual Restaurant

Post navigation

Previous Post Amazon Launching Pop-Up Shops in Whole Foods
Next Post Want: Ember’s Connected Coffee Mug (for Real!)

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Get The Spoon in Your Inbox

The Spoon Podcast Network!

Feed your mind! Subscribe to one of our podcasts!

How ReShape is Using AI to Accelerate Biotech Research
How Eva Goulbourne Turned Her ‘Party Trick’ Into a Career Building Sustainable Food Systems
Combustion Acquires Recipe App Crouton
Next-Gen Fridge Startup Tomorrow Shuts Down
From Starday to Shiru to Givaudan, AI Is Now Tablestakes Across the Food Value Chain

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.