Uber Eats Lost Out on Grubhub but is Still Fighting to Gain Market Share

There has been a lot of talk recently about Uber eats potentially combining forces with Grubhub. However, the rumors were officially quelled when European delivery app, Just Eat Takeaway came out of nowhere and made a deal with Grubhub forcing UberEats to drop out.

Just Eat Takeaway acquired Grubhub for $7.3 billion, forming the world’s largest online food delivery company outside of China. This new merger is going to provide some serious competition for both UberEats and the current US market leader, Doordash.

UberEats is already in an unprofitable situation, having lost $313 million last quarter. If they had been able to secure the GrubHub acquisition, they would have owned 55% of the food delivery market in the US which would have been huge for their margins. However, some are claiming that this might also have been the very reason why Uber ended up dropping out at the last minute. According to The Wall Street Journal, regulators could have prevented the deal from going through if Uber was going to own a majority of the market.

While this is a tough blow for Uber, they are still fighting by offering more deals, incentives, and new features to lure customers. Most recently, Uber Eats has released a new feature called “Priority Delivery”. For an additional 99 cents to $2, customers can now choose to make their delivery a “priority”. In other words, by paying extra you can guarantee that your delivery driver handles your order first before dropping off another order in the queue. According to Uber Eats this is guaranteed to speed up your delivery time by about 5-10 minutes.