Uber to shut down Drizly alcohol delivery service in March

Company acquired for $1.1 billion in 2021 now is redundant.

The service that kept countless Americans stocked up on beer, wine and spirits during the pandemic will deliver its last bottle this spring. Uber confirmed that it will shut down Drizly, the alcohol-delivery service it acquired in 2021 for $1.1 billion, at the end of March.

“After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app,” Pierre Dimitri Gore-Coty, senior vice president of delivery, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Uber stock was up slightly Tuesday after news of Drizly’s closure started to make its way around the internet.

The decision to shutter Drizly apparently is based on business redundancies and convenience. Consumers, an Uber spokeswoman noted, prefer to use a single app when ordering deliveries, and the alcohol category on Uber Eats had doubled globally in the last year. The Uber Eats app has the ability to deliver alcohol to 35 states and more than 25 countries around the world, she said.

The switch-over apparently won’t cause Drizly consumers much grief. The majority of Drizly users, a spokeswoman said, also have Uber accounts. As of the third quarter of 2023, Uber had 142 million active monthly users.

Founded in 2012 by Cory Rellas, Justin Robinson, Nicholas Rellas and Spencer Frazier, Drizly partners with retail to deliver alcohol directly to consumers. The Boston-based company’s sales skyrocketed during the early days and months of the pandemic, when Americans increased their drinking habits while stuck at home. In 2020, Drizly reported that its sales increased 350 percent over the previous year. Sales peaked April 17, 2020, with a reported 1,000 percent increase compared to sales a year earlier.