Uber Eats to Pursue Smaller European Restaurants

Battling Just Eat and Takeaway.com in a crowded market, Uber Eats is opening up its platform to more restaurants in Europe that prefer to use their own delivery staff as it is seeking business with smaller, independent restaurants.

Offering a complete range of services, Uber has built its business with a takeaway food delivery unit as a ride-hailing group. It is planning to expand to large chains including McDonald’s, Subway, and KFC. Also, these large chains include first to high-end restaurants that did not offer delivery.

Uber needs to win more business in Europe, where more food is ordered directly from independent outlets. Furthermore, where most players are spending heavily on marketing and still loss-making, the need for scale intensifies to weed out winners and losers in a $107 billion global market.

Contributing to a $1 billion overall loss and as its revenue almost doubled last quarter, Uber Eats drivers are tripling incentives to $291 million. Uber is investing to build up its food delivery business.

In a news report, Uber Eats’ Stephane Ficaja said, “We have a lot of restaurants out there … that want to do their own delivery,”

She also added, “We are really targeting the more smaller, independent restaurants.”

As customers and restaurants connect to over 150 towns and cities in Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, Uber Eats is now rolling out the platform-only service. The company targets an estimated additional 120,000 restaurants but it is currently in partnership with more than 40,000 restaurants across Europe.

At the start of this year, after launching in Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands it is only testing the service in Europe. Without elaborating, it said take-up had been “good”.

Uber Eats Competitor Analysis

According to usage data from computer and mobile traffic measurement firm SimilarWeb, Uber Eats is a distant challenger in Italy and Spain and a closer competitor to Just Eat and Deliveroo in France and Belgium.

The market is limited in size. The delivery provider avoids the costs of logistics infrastructure and riders that make platform-only businesses more profitable.

Claiming to be the world’s largest takeout service outside China, Uber Eats had delivered higher from the previous $3 billion in 2017, into $8 billion of meals last year as it turn three-year-old in the service.

Last month, Amazon said it would end its U.S. restaurant food delivery service where its rivals included GrubHub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, after illustrating the intensity of competition in the food-delivery business.

At the end of last year, Germany’s Delivery Hero relinquished its home market to Dutch rival Takeaway.com.