Uber Eats, the food delivery service within the Uber ride-hailing app, announced Tuesday the company is launching in new cities and expanding to suburban areas, including in Atlanta, to serve 70 percent of the U.S. population by the end of 2018.
The new expansion will double Uber Eats' city count from the previous year. Uber has recently expanded the service to Canada, France, Mexico, Japan and India. In Georgia, the service recently expanded to Athens and Savannah earlier this year.
"Our expansion into these cities covers mostly suburban areas and even rural areas," Rachel Jaye, Uber Eats general manager, said. "Specific for us in Atlanta and in the southeast, we’ve seen Uber Eats grow tremendously in Atlanta and our service area has grown in every direction in the last year, actually. When we started we maybe had 50 restaurants and now we’ve grown to have thousands in the Atlanta metro."
In November, Uber Eats will expand to Fayetteville and Peachtree City in the Metro Atlanta area, in addition to Macon and Columbus, Jaye said. In the metro area, Uber Eats currently covers all the way up to Roswell and Alpharetta and down south to Union City and Riverdale.
"We’re continuing to expand, but our general goal is to be present in the city," she said.
Across the southeast, Uber Eats has launched in Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa and Auburn, Alabama, with plans to launch in Mobile next month; Charleston, Columbia, Greenville and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
"It is in part driven by the folks in our Atlanta office," Jaye said. "So we have over 50 Uber Eats employees who are only focused on growing Uber Eats in Atlanta and across the U.S."
Last month, Uber saw order volume increase 10x compared to two years prior. In the past three months, 40 percent of new Uber Eats users have been brand new to Uber, Jaye said.
"It’s interesting because I think we always thought, ‘We’ll get our customers that use the ride app, they’ll come over to Uber Eats,'" she said. "But actually what we’re seeing is more and more people are seeing the need for Uber Eats whereas before it maybe didn’t fit in with their lifestyle. I think we’re going to continue to see this as we expand to the suburbs---where people will have their cars and they always drive their cars to and from work, but everyone’s hungry, everyone needs to eat. So I suspect we’ll see some really good uptick with our suburban expansion."
In addition to the expansion announcement, the company also said it was unveiling a new self-signup process, so restaurants can upload their menus, get set-up and start doing deliveries.
"We just seen that more and more people are trying it every day," Jaye said. "What we’ve seen is pretty astronomical adoption of the Uber Eats platform. When we think of the first three years of Uber Eats versus UberX’s growth, we’ve seen that Eats grew as fast and sometimes faster than UberX."
