Uber Eats Deleting 1,000s of “Ghost Restaurants” from the App

Who knew that you could be “ghosted” by Uber Eats! According to The Wall Street Journal, who first reported this story, Uber Eats is working on delisting some of restaurants on its app to help weed out low-quality listings. Through this delisting process, Uber is introducing a new set of standards for listed restaurants that will help to cut down on ghost listings that contain the same menu as other listed restaurants.

The Verge describes Ghost Kitchens as “Virtual restaurants (Ghost Kitchens) don’t have a physical location where you can actually sit down and eat. Instead, they’re often run out of existing restaurants, warehouses, and sometimes even parking lots and exist solely to sell food on delivery apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash. While some of these locations are independently run, others belong to larger companies that franchise out their brand to a chain of individual operators, like MrBeast Burger.”

Since many of these ghost kitchens are “related” to actual brick and mortar restaurants, Uber Eats is ending up with repetitive listings, where one restaurant may have different branding but the same exact menu. One deli in NYC has 14 ghost listings all with the same menu! To crack down on this redundant listing process, Uber is requiring any “virtual restaurants” have a menu that is at least 60% different from any other restaurant on the platform. Through this process Uber is estimating that they will be removing around 5,000 listings.

Furthermore, Uber will now also require that restaurant listings maintain a 4.3-star rating or higher on the app, have 5 percent or fewer orders that they have canceled, and have a 5 percent or lower inaccurate orders rate. If restaurants fall below these standards than Uber states that it “reserves the right to remove VRs from the Uber Platforms that are not in compliance.”

For now, we recommend always verifying you Uber Eats restaurant through Google Maps before placing your order!