Introducing Eats for Business | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Eats for Business

uber.com

77 pointskposehn32 comments

There is a lot of hate about this, but most comments actually sound like the OP didn't even read the article.

According to the article this is not going to be a catering service where 1 order brings food for the whole company, but an integration of Eats into Uber for Business.

> a way for organizations to use Uber Eats to manage food delivery for employees, whether they’re ordering to the office or traveling for work.

So it just basically something allowing people to order food _for themselves_ while having a part of the order automatically paid by the company.

So, no issues here of driver having to "carry up 5 catering trays plus utensils and sides for your office." like the top comment said.

This is barely just a new payment system basically.

[full disclosure: I used to work at Uber, but not on Eats]

A thought experiment: Lets say they manage to offer restaurant quality food(in-spite delivery) for business lunches, at half the price of a restaurant.

And let's say we see similar trends in price/quality/convenience in pre-made food for the home.

How does that affect consumer behavior with regards to restaurants ?

And how can a regular guy profit from such trends ?

Regular guy already profits from such trends when he orders from Uber and similar services. I know that I profit every day when I use taxi at with higher quality and lower price than 10 years ago.

Or you can always set up a ghost kitchen - they're about to boom all around the world, I'd guess.

If you do set up a ghost kitchen, would suggest you do some research first. Lots of laws and insurance and marketing and logistics.

I was co-founder of a startup for a few years heavily involved in this space ( https://www.thefoodcorridor.com ) and running a kitchen is not for the faint of heart. In fact, being anywhere in food is not (I also have a relative who runs a couple of food businesses).

Lots of cash flow, but skinny margins.

I read that travis kalanick. ex uber founder, has a set up a chain of ghost kitchens("cloud kitchens") for rent for entrepreneurs.

Do you think he can offer something new ?

Are ghost kitchen inherently a big business(with a large advantage to scale) ?

And if so, how centralized will it go, what tasks do you think will go to the big biz, and what will remain for entrepreneurs ?

Ghost kitchens are an interesting play. I think they could have scale advantages as you need to build software systems to:

See demand in the market

Deliver customers

Pivot when demand changes

I think those are all systems that will be better at scale.

Actually creating food at scale is a known problem that has been done many times (McDonald's, Chipotle, etc). However, cloud kitchens are providing mass customization of restaurants, rather than stamping out the same (or very similar) franchises. That is going to be one of the more difficult parts.

I used to think that. But then all these food-delivery services with around 100% markup showed up and seem to be thriving

Ah, being in software around food is great.

It's just like the other parts of the food chain. Being a primary producer or a end retailer are very low margin businesses, but being in the middle can be healthy.

Which food delivery services have 100% markup? Delivery or subscription fees that work out closer to 10% seem to be common for the ones I've seen; even with the aggressive begging for tips built into the apps, it wouldn't hit anywhere near 100%.

We have Chomp. My sister reports folks ordering coffee or chocolate from her shop, and paying as much for delivery as the product.

Sure, the flat delivery charges can be 100% on a minimal order, but I don't think that that is the majority of the business of a food delivery service.

Its almost the entirety of her Chomp orders

Perhaps, but on what basis would you suspect this one business (which you know about largely because it seems surprising) is representative of food businesses accessible through Chomp generally (much less some segment consisting of multiple delivery services)?

Uber betting on the notch removal next year I see.

Would be very amusing if they started cooking up this program because SF proposed their cafeteria ban.

Say you want to last minute cater for a small meeting or conference. Suddenly adding a 15 meal or 30 dish demand in to an existing fulfillment network is not going to result in 15 minute service, or even under 1 hour service. It's going to train wreck.

hopefully has better selection than fooda.

This speaks to one of the most profound things about Uber: once an infrastructure of transportation workers is set up, a single software development project can instantly transform the value of that network no matter how large it is. Many metropolitan areas, I’d imagine, would love to incentivize their resident corporations to spend more money on local food services (those “late night food allowances” are greater than what the finance firm’s employees would spend themselves) but can neither justify the development costs nor provide upside as an incentive. Hardware meets wetware meets capitalism. It’s both a thing of beauty and a little saddening at the same time.

Uber still can’t get consumer Eats right. My last order roamed the city for 30 minutes before arriving cold. The order before that was stolen by the driver. They picked it up and left San Francisco.

Good luck getting an Uber driver to carry up 5 catering trays plus utensils and sides for your office. Maybe there’s a chance if Uber gives every driver a foldable cart that fits in the trunk without taking up luggage space for airport Uber rides.

Reading the press release this is just allowing individual employees to order a regular meal via uber eats and have the company pay for it directly rather than having to expense it. The only mention of catering was a box of donuts.

I order from Ubereats constantly – at least once a day, sometimes two or even three – and this is my number one issue.

For some reason Uber thinks it's appropriate to assign multiple deliveries to a single driver even when those deliveries are in the complete opposite direction to one another. Doesn't make any sense at all.

You'd think that the whole point of using computers for managing deliveries is to avoid precisely that.

I mean, either optimization classes I took at uni were a bunch of hokum, or for some reason companies in XXI century still don't use/can't write simple route/schedule optimizers.

Or - or, and just hear me out, there are occasional real world complications that cause unforeseen errors and people only talk about the tail end of poor predictions rather than the 95+% good experiences.

That seems unlikely, everybody in my area (that I speak to) loathes these delivery services because they consistently screw these things up. It’s not 1 in a 100, it’s more like 9 out of 10..

I never ever had this problem in London and I never heard of any friend having it either.

If it's like the Taxi app, there is a button in a corner of the app to report and they will refund you.

That doesn't mean they can't get business eats right. Your experience is probably a win for them, it means they're getting a lot of drivers of varying quality. Also if you complained about it, that helps them to deactivate drivers that steal food and improve their process (they can probably keep ones that make the food cold, some don't mind (like me, at least for most types of foods and if I'm eating by myself) and some will just use a microwave). If they only had high quality drivers, they wouldn't be the growth company that they are. For businesses they can change it up, maybe even hire W2 employees. And they can even have a good experience in places that get press like SF and a mediocre experience for places outside of it. Only a handful of decision makers will judge their business service based on their consumer performance or performance in other markets. They also have name recognition - nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.

It's weird how positive you are about a business venture failing at the only thing that they are required to do -- bring you food in a timely fashion. "Your experience is probably a win for them" is a very strange way to prioritise what's important when running a business -- unhappy customers are a win somehow?

> If they only had high quality drivers, they [...]

... would actually be a good service?

> nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.

IBM, not Microsoft.

The thing that's important when running a business is making money. Having happy repeat customers is one way to do this, but there are many others. Having unhappy customers and crushing the competition is another. Having a steady stream of new customers is another (see also, MLM schemes). Selling a product where customers cannot meaningfully evaluate quality is another (see also, Facebook video marketing).

If you don't like it, help the rest of us figure out a sustainable alternative to capitalism.

I'm sure that this is the reasoning they use to justify it, it doesn't mean that we should use the same reasoning to judge them as a company.

Sure. I guess my argument is, judge them all you want, nothing will change unless they have a concrete incentive to act differently.

People may not like this answer, but it is a good summary of their internal thought process.

I didn't read the article, so I deserve downvotes. Uber might go after ZeroCater eventually, but this announcement is about making it so businesses can conveniently pay for meals that their staff order using the UberEats service. The screenshot is of someone just ordering one meal, for about 10 bucks plus tax (which is 22% for some reason - does it include SF Mandates? [1]) and a five dollar delivery charge. It doesn't really change it much.

1: https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Explainer-Wh...

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