Building H Index
Uber Eats
INDUSTRY
food
Category
food/grocery delivery service
products Profiled
Uber Eats prepared food and grocery delivery service
H-Score
33
ranked 12th of 16 within food industry
ranked 27th of 37 overall
product description
Uber Eats leverages Uber’s network of couriers to connect customers to merchants, delivering take-out meals from local restaurants and convenience stores and, now in over 400 selected cities and towns, delivering groceries. There is also an Eats Pass, which customers can subscribe to for $9.99 a month, which includes free delivery for orders more than $15, 5% off, and other benefits.(1)
product usage
Users use the Uber app (or the Uber website) to order ready-to-eat meals from local restaurants, which are then delivered to their doors. Users can opt to pick up the meals themselves. In selected cities, users can order groceries through Uber Eats and either have them delivered or pick them up.(2)
influence on health-related behaviors
EATING
slight to moderate negative influence
Uber offers both prepared food delivery and grocery delivery. Prepared food delivery services often substitute less healthy restaurant or fast food options for home-cooked meals. Grocery shopping, on the other hand, leads to more home-cooked meals.
In general, fresh, home-cooked meals have been shown to be healthier than meals eaten at or taken out from sit-down or fast food restaurants.(3-7) People who cook at home more frequently also tend to have diets that have higher compliance with dietary guidelines.(8)
In Building H’s consumer research, 47% of users of food delivery services (not specific to Uber Eats) say that their orders typically replace home-cooked meals. In addition, the research showed that 37.1% of users eat home-cooked meals five or more nights a week vs. 58.1% of the general public.(9)
Building H’s consumer research showed that users of food delivery services more often order from sit-down restaurants (27.6% say usually or always), than from fast food restaurants (18.0%) or convenience stores (10.9%).(10)
In Building H’s consumer research, over 90% of users of online grocery delivery services (not specific to Uber Eats) said that their groceries were healthier (67.9%) or as healthy as (23.2%) takeout or delivery meals.(11) It’s not clear how Uber Eats users split their orders among restaurants, convenience stores or grocery stores. Non-restaurant deliveries have been estimated to be less than 5% of Uber Eats’s overall deliveries.(12)
Uber Eats does include a category for “Healthy” food prominently on the home screen. It is not clear how Uber Eats determines which restaurants merit the “Healthy” tag. For its grocery delivery service, Uber Eats appears to default to “fruits and vegetables” – a healthy choice – as the first category listed.
- Work across the industry to pursue options to rate the healthfulness of individual food items and to rate food establishments on the basis of how healthy their menus are.
- Integrate these ratings into the presentation of restaurant options and search results. Options for this integration could include featuring higher-rated establishments more prominently, using the ratings to filter search results and raising healthier establishments higher in result lists; or displaying the ratings in the results lists.
- Consider using such ratings to give both grocery delivery and meal delivery users feedback on overall healthfulness of their orders and/or propose healthy substitutions for less healthy items.
- Enable users to express preferences for how healthy they want their diet to be; align recommendations with those preferences; and provide users with feedback on how well their choices are supporting those preferences.
- Offer price discounts for healthier orders.
PHYSICAL ACTVITY
slight negative influence
By decreasing barriers to getting restaurant quality food, Uber Eats has made it possible for people to have a dining out experience without the physical activity of getting to and from the restaurant.
Uber Eats does offer a pickup option. It is not clear how often users select pickup instead of delivery, although Uber has enhanced its pickup service in recent years, offering a map that shows restaurants with pickup service within walking distance, for example.(13)
- Consider setting pickup (vs. delivery) to be the default option, subject to conditions such as distance, weather and individual abilities.
- Prompt pickup users to walk if the distance is relatively short (i.e. less than a mile), subject to conditions such as weather and individual abilities.
- Promote the pickup option as an alternative prior to finalizing a delivery order.
Sleeping
neutral influence
Uber Eats couriers can work at all hours, as long as there are establishments open at the time. Through their services, getting late night food is more convenient than ever before, and consequently, customers could forego sleep in favor of late night food.
In addition, studies have shown that eating within three hours before bedtime increases the likelihood of sleep disruption.(14)
By offering the opportunity to obtain food quickly, Uber Eats could potentially be saving people time for sleeping.
- Enable users to set preferences as to when they wish to be done eating at night and introduce some friction into the experience of ordering deliveries that will go past their set end points.
Engaging Socially
slight negative influence
By allowing the delivery of restaurant food that may have not been available for delivery before, Uber Eats effectively substitutes an at-home, potentially isolated dining experience for a public experience.
However, Uber Eats does offer a group ordering feature that makes it easy for people to share a food delivery (and presumably eat together).(15)
- For its grocery delivery service:
- offer party planning features to simplify the process of developing menus and ordering ingredients as a way to lower the barriers to hosting meals with friends and family
- experiment with “preferred shopper” service to foster relationships between customers and shoppers
Getting Outdoors
slight to moderate negative influence
If ordering to their home, a customer is remaining indoors throughout the whole process of selecting and eating a meal, as compared to the outdoor experiences that could come from traveling to and from grocery stores or restaurants.
Using Uber Eats’s pickup option would entail some amount of outdoor exposure, depending on the chosen transportation mode.
Uber Eats enables customers to set a delivery location by dropping a pin on a map, instead of specifying a building address, which can facilitate having food delivered to an outdoor location (for a picnic).
- Pursue opportunities for encouraging use of the pickup option (see above).
Notes
What is Eats Pass? Uber Help website, accessed January 27, 2022
Uber. Introducing Grocery Delivery. Uber Newsroom website, July 7, 2020
Julia Wolfson and Sara Bleich. Is Cooking at Home Associated with Better Diet Quality or Weight-Loss Intention? Public Health Nutrition, Volume 18, Supplement 8 June 2015 , pp. 1397-1406.
Junxiu Liu et al. Quality of Meals Consumed by US Adults at Full-Service and Fast-Food Restaurants, 2003–2016: Persistent Low Quality and Widening Disparities. The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 150, Issue 4, April 2020, pp. 873–883.
R. An. Fast-food and full-service restaurant consumption and daily energy and nutrient intakes in US adults. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2016 Jan;70(1):97–103.
S.I. Kirkpatrick et al. Fast-food menu offerings vary in dietary quality, but are consistently poor. Public Health Nutr. 2014 Apr;17(4):924–31.
L.M. Powell and BT Nguyen. Fast-food and full-service restaurant consumption among children and adolescents: effect on energy, beverage, and nutrient intake. JAMA Pediatr. 2013 Jan;167(1):14–20.
A. Tiwari et al. Cooking at Home: A Strategy to Comply With U.S. Dietary Guidelines at No Extra Cost. Am J Prev Med. 2017 May 1;52(5):616–24.
Steve Downs. A Survey of Modern Life: Food; Delivery Apps, Meal Kits, Groceries and Cooking Dinner. Building H on Medium. January 20, 2022
Ibid.
Ibid.
Dee-Ann Durbin. Uber Eats and DoorDash are now delivering groceries, flowers to meet customer demands. Fortune, July 28, 2021
Julie Littman. Uber Eats revamp looks to improve restaurant discoverability. Food Dive. October 8, 2020
Nicola Chung et al. Does the Proximity of Meals to Bedtime Influence the Sleep of Young Adults? A Cross-Sectional Survey of University Students. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Apr 14;17(8):2677
How to place a group order. Uber Help website, accessed January 27, 2022