Uber Eats plots push into grocery deliveries

The tech titan’s potential plans were revealed after its Uber Eats food ordering and delivery platform registered a 72% spike in revenue to $595m (£492m) in the three months to June 30.

That rate of growth easily outstripped that of the wider group, where total revenues advanced 14.4% to $3.2bn (£2.7bn).

Despite the sales spike, Uber suffered a loss of $5.2bn (£4.3bn), increasing from $878m (£726m) in the same quarter last year, and is now seeking to build on the fastest-growing part of its business.

The ambitions for Uber Eats to make a more concerted push into fulfilling grocery orders, as well as restaurant meals, could see it go toe-to-toe with the likes of Amazon Fresh.

In the UK, Sainsbury’s is reported to be in talks about a partnership with Uber Eats as it seeks to broaden its delivery proposition, while rival Deliveroo has piloting home deliveries for the Co-op in Manchester.

Earlier this year, Uber Eats extended a partnership with Australian supermarket giant Coles, offering both cooked meals and grocery staples such as bread, milk and fruit for delivery from a store in Sydney.

Uber Eats boss Jason Droege said: “There is a bit of an ecommerce ‘moment’ that is happening at a local level. That’s a lot of what we are investing behind here.

“I can shop almost everywhere outside of a city through my phone or my computer but it’s actually pretty hard to shop the merchants in my city. Uber Eats, in one way, is a restaurant delivery service. In another way, we are solving customers’ dining needs.

“If you abstractly think about it that way, grocery stores and restaurants are serving a lot of the same needs.”

Uber admitted its grocery delivery services and ideas to push that side of the business forward were “experiments”, but Droege said he hoped a more comprehensive grocery service would be borne out of the pilots “soon”.

He added: “Businesses that operate locally are realising that ecommerce is or can be an effective channel. I think that actually the conversations we’ve had with some of these potential partners have been really encouraging in terms of how to work together to bring them online.