What’s in store for Uber Eats?

With food delivery having become part and parcel of our everyday lives, Business Day spoke to Nakampe Molewa, Uber Eats’ GM for Sub-Saharan Africa, to see if it is likely to lose orders as vaccinated consumers go back to restaurants and choose to stay at home less.

With food delivery having become a part and parcel of our everyday lives, Business Day spoke to Uber Eats GM for Sub-Saharan Africa, Nakampe Molewa, to see if it is likely to lose orders as vaccinated consumers go back to restaurants and normality and choose to stay at home less. How much did the lockdowns and people staying at home provide a boost to Uber Eats?

While most economic sectors and traditional businesses have been impacted by Covid-19, the online logistics and food delivery platforms have grown exponentially over the past 18 months.

The app is now available in 33 cities across SA and we have over 6,000 restaurants on the platform.

As people have been vaccinated or start resuming normal life, are fewer people using delivery?

Delivery is here to stay as it becomes a bigger part of our everyday lives. We won’t keep seeing the growth rates that we have just experienced but still expect a healthy growth rate, in future.

There has been a fundamental behavioural shift in SA and globally. We’ve got more eaters and they’re eating more.

The trend towards ordering “on demand-essentials” [groceries and alcohol], is evident in Uber Eats’s latest data which shows a 1,860% increase of these orders since the lockdown in March last year.

Restaurants complain that paying a 30% commission to Uber eats is unsustainable and eats up their entire profit margin. How can delivery be made to work for all?

Restaurants choose to partner with Uber Eats for the number of benefits it provides, including attracting potential new customers.

The fee paid by restaurants is commercially sensitive and varies between restaurants and locations.

By being a part of the Uber

Eats marketplace, restaurants receive visibility and placement on the app, often based on the personal taste of consumers. Restaurants often see an increase in new customer traffic and sales, while also having access to 24/7 customer support and valuable insights and data.

They can see customer reviews, what their best sellers are, when they get the most orders, how quickly their team is working and more.

Uber Eats has one of the largest networks of delivery people who can help restaurants get their deliveries out fast, particularly because they’re using our custom mapping technology. This means that restaurants have time to prepare for more deliveries than usual.

Is home-cooked African food still as popular as before lockdown?

There is growing demand from South Africans to have their favourite local cuisines available and we are adding more local restaurants. Mogodu, kota’s, meat with pap & chakalaka are just some examples of popular options. Uber Eats offers 132 different cuisines.

How many delivery drivers in SA have registered with Uber Eats?

Uber Eats has over 8 000 active delivery people on the platform.

There has been criticism in the way drivers are treated by some consumers. As a business, we prioritise the safety of everyone who uses our app and offer the following safety measures: All delivery people have injury protection from AIG Insurance, access to an in-app private emergency assistance button and 24/7 in-app support.

With the power of the GPS data and sensor information, approved by delivery people, Uber’s technology can detect when something may not be going quite right.

The feature flags instances where an unexpected long stop occurs during delivery and notifies of a potential incident. When a RideCheck is initiated, the delivery person will receive a notification asking if everything is okay, so that they can either let Uber Eats know through the app that all is well or take other actions like using the emergency button.

Uber’s incident response team can contact the courier’s relatives in case of an accident and or for insurance purposes.

What trends are you seeing that tell us more about South Africans?

We have just released our third annual Uber Eats Cravings Report, which is a snapshot of the most popular and most unusual delivery orders requests we see each year.

Burgers remain king with over 2-million orders in a year, followed by pizzas and chicken.

Eaters in Kimberley and Johannesburg were the most likely to order healthy food. Bread is the number one selling grocery item in SA.

Vegan dishes proved to be more popular than ever this year, with a 45% rise in vegan restaurants joining the app and orders increasing by 42% since the same time in 2020.

Vegan desserts account for a large percentage of favourite dishes, with vegan Muggachino, vegan carrot cake and vegan chocolate cake the favourite options.

Does Uber Eats help enable small businesses?

The most exciting development for Uber Eats is seeing “dark kitchens” in the townships join Uber Eats, with these restaurants leading the charge. (A dark kitchen is one that only makes food for delivery and is not customer facing.)

Did any SA customers stand out for you?

One eater in SA has ordered 53 times in one month, while another spent over R16,000 on one order.