Uber’s Catering Push & Who Produces Your Fast Food Fries?

John Crotteau (0:01)

Uber is spending $2.3 billion on a company that delivers your corporate slot bowl.

Emily Milliron (0:07)

And straight, curly or waffle, we dig into earnings from the company behind your favorite frozen fries.

John Crotteau (0:13)

For Tuesday, October 6th, it's Brew Markets Daily. I'm John Crotteau.

Emily Milliron (0:15)

And I'm Emily Milliron. Let's get moving and grooving.

John Crotteau (0:26)

Emily, welcome back to Brew Markets. It's great to have you here in the studio. And in our morning meeting today, I brought up a headline about new M&A out of Uber.

Emily Milliron (0:36)

You did.

John Crotteau (0:36)

And you had a lot to say. You were on fire.

Emily Milliron (0:38)

I did. I did.

John Crotteau (0:39)

All right. Well, I want to hear all of it. So we're going to get into Uber, start us off with some context about their latest acquisition that was announced today.

Emily Milliron (0:47)

Yeah, I've been at Morning Brew now for almost five years, and I've done an abnormal amount of coverage on Uber. So anytime they're in the headlines, I'm innately interested.

There are a lot of things to talk about, but we can start with the freshest news. They're acquiring Easy Cater. It's a $2.3 billion all cash deal, which is no small check. So what is Easy Cater? It's a Boston-based platform businesses use to order food for meetings, events, other office gatherings. Uber said in a statement Tuesday that it expects the deal to close in the coming months. Food delivery already makes up nearly half of Uber's gross bookings and is growing faster than rides, John, if you can believe that. Catering gives that business more room to run, and it also helps Uber keep pace with DoorDash, which is the US food delivery leader, which launched workplace catering in April of this year. So maybe Easy Cater is something our office can look into when we have lunch catered on Wednesdays, and it is an interesting move for Uber as the company expands these delivery options.

John Crotteau (1:45)

Yeah, it does seem like catering is the next frontier. DoorDash got into it. We're going to talk about Ghost Kitchens at some point on the show. And it seems like options generally is what Uber is after. They have been busy with acquisitions. Let's take a look at some of the different features they've recently added to the app over the last two years. Most recently, they announced that you can book a hotel through their app. That's a partnership with Expedia, which is a company Uber's CEO, Dara Kasrashahi previously ran. Uber also launched a Shop For Me feature that lets you request items from local stores that aren't in the traditional Uber Eats app. Have you used that one?

Emily Milliron (2:20)

I haven't yet, no, but it is something I will be looking at.

John Crotteau (2:23)

Yeah, exactly. And of course, they're looking into the autonomous vehicle sector. Waymo RoboTaxis are bookable on Uber in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. There's Uber Courier for packages. I used that recently on January 1st, where some people left things at my house.

Emily Milliron (2:40)

It is incredibly convenient.

John Crotteau (2:41)

Yeah, there was a New Year's Eve party. We woke up, some people left some things, and I was like, I'm not going to come to your house.

And so that worked out really well. And if you feel like driving, you can rent a car. Then as you mentioned, there's obviously Uber Eats, which accounts for 33% of the company's total business. All right, frankly, when I've opened up the app to use that delivery service or to consider renting a car, which I didn't end up doing it, I found the app to be cluttered. There's a lot of little tiles. It's something they have to figure out. But Uber is working on it. They moved the search bar within the app with the goal of making it easier to find everything and access to all its different services in one place.

Emily Milliron (3:17)

Well, it's interesting you bring that up, John, because I actually did attend Uber's Go Get event this year, which is their annual product rollout. It was in the southern part of Manhattan. And their CEO, Dara, said Uber is now a quote, app for everything. This was said specifically when he was talking about rolling out the hotels feature, but you get the idea.

And one thing from the event that I found really fascinating was how they are integrating AI, which I can't believe it's taken us this long for me to say those two letters in this show. But they shared a feature where if you're at a restaurant and you had a great lasagna, if you want to integrate Uber Eats into that experience, you can take a picture of the lasagna, upload it to the Uber app, and it will give you a list of ingredients used to make that lasagna. And you can go, I want to Uber Eats all of that to my house right now.