Uber goes gourmet shuttle – from eatery to your home
EVER BEEN to your favourite restaurant and found it fully booked?
Now you can enjoy meals from your favourite eatery in the comfort of your living room at the click of a button with UberEATS, a new on-demand delivery service that has finally come to Cape Town.
Uber, the transportation company known for its shuttle services, now also delivers food from your favourite restaurant.
By creating an UberEATS account or using your existing Uber account, you can order a standard or customised meal from over 100 restaurants and eateries on the UberEATS application on your smartphone or online.
Add your delivery address, search through the large variety of meals from burgers to sushi, pay with your debit or credit card and an additional R20 delivery fee, and your meal will be delivered within the specified time.
Meals can also be pre-ordered and scheduled for delivery at your convenience.
UberEATS launched in Cape Town two weeks ago, and aims to deliver healthy food at the same speed the shuttle service is famous for.
Restaurants operations manager Dave Kitley says this is Uber’s new venture into logistics.
“UberEATS is Uber’s new delivery platform.
“It’s Uber’s first venture into the logistics world. Uber has been experimenting with commodity delivery in some way or form for five years.
“It was our customers’ appetite for food that really gave rise to this.
“It’s a great relationship after five years of transporting people around.
“And now we’re saying if you can get a vehicle to someone in under five minutes, what else can we get to that person in the same time frame?
“It’s about getting your local favourite foods in Uber speed,” he says.
Kitley adds: “UberEATS is all about partnering with your local favourite restaurants.
“And these are restaurants that don’t appear on other platforms and possibly even some where you can’t get yourself a table.
“It’s about us partnering with restaurants to give us access to a new customer base.”
Kitley says UberEATS focuses on the marketing and logistics and the restaurants “do the rest which is creating excellent tasting dishes”.
“Our mission to our clients is to bring them good, healthy food fast and not really fast food,” Kitley says.
“Our whole aspect around that is partnering with restaurants to make sure there is a wide variety of food options for the consumer,” says Kitley.
UberEATS is currently concentrated in the City Bowl, Camps Bay, Atlantic Seaboard, Woodstock and Observatory.
However, Kitley says they plan to expand the service across the City.
“We are operating from Camps Bay through to Observatory and we are going to start operations in the Southern Suburbs until Kenilworth, Claremont and Newlands this Thursday.
“We’ll continue to expand across Cape Town as quickly as we can.
“It’s been really well received so far and Cape Town is one of the food capitals of the world so this service is bringing people the solution that they might not have had before,” says Kitley.