Uber Eats to Remove Tons of Restaurants

Your options on Uber Eats are about to be a bit more limited. In an effort to streamline its offerings, and amid the introduction of a new set of standards, the online food ordering and delivery platform is set to remove some 5,000 delivery-only restaurants on its app, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The thousands of restaurants to be delisted are all online-only brands across North America. Often referred to as ghost kitchens, these are delivery businesses without physical storefronts and are instead typically run out of existing restaurants, warehouses, and sometimes parking lots. Consisting of around 13% of online storefronts in North America, these ghost kitchens exist solely to sell food on delivery apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash. The existence of these ghost kitchens rose starkly amid the pandemic and grew to more than 40,000 this year from over 10,000 in 2021. The issue with some of these ghost kitchens is that some offers are often run by the same company, and sometimes out of the same location, leading to duplicate menus while keeping the parent restaurant on the app.

The move to delist these restaurants comes as Uber Eats introduces a new set of standards for virtual restaurants meant to cut down on listings that sometimes contain the same menu. Per the new standards, virtual locations must have menu items that “are at least 60% different” from any other virtual restaurants “operating from that same physical location.” The same rules apply for the brand’s “parent restaurant,” or the kitchen that houses the virtual brands. Uber will also now require the ghost kitchen and its parent restaurant to maintain a 4.3-star rating or higher on the app, have 5% or fewer orders that they have canceled, and have a 5% or lower inaccurate orders rate. Uber added that it “reserves the right to remove VRs from the Uber Platforms that are not in compliance.” The objective of these new standards is to give merchants a fair shot at user attention and promote quality over quantity.

“Communicating – and beginning to enforce – these new quality standards for Virtual Restaurants on Uber Eats is an important step for our program, designed to benefit both consumers and merchants,” John Mullenholz, Uber’s virtual restaurant head, told The Verge. “We took care to introduce standards that let our restaurant partners continue to flex their creativity, as we know delivery-only concepts are an exciting way for operators to invest in the growth of their businesses.”

Among the brands affected by the delisting action are 12 virtual brands selling identical breakfast burritos from a Colorado sports bar, 14 brands serving identical sandwiches from a New York City deli, and multiple online-only options from a San Francisco-based Pakistani restaurant, per the New York Post.