Food business provides a massive opportunity: Bhavik Rathod on UberEATS

Uber, the technology company that has been transforming mobility across the world, now seeks to cater to the gastronomic demands of consumers in India with UberEATS. UberEATS is a food delivery app that consumers can use to get food delivered from the partner restaurants to the place of their choice. This service is currently available in four areas of Mumbai. PayTM has been roped in as their first launch partner to make it easy for consumers to pay for the meals. 

UberEATS was started in 2014 as a small delivery pilot in Los Angeles and launched as a separate application in Toronto in December 2015. In the past 18 months, it has grown to become a stand-alone app available in 26 countries and in 78 cities around the globe, including India. 

Bhavik Rathod has been appointed to lead UberEATS in India and spearhead its expansion across the country. Commenting on the launch in India, Rathod said, “Mumbai is home to a booming food industry with a vibrant food culture offering both global and local cuisines. The introduction of UberEATS in India, with Mumbai as the first city, is a major step in our global expansion and showcases our commitment to the region. The app brings the perfect pairing of amazing restaurant partners, innovative technology, and the efficient Uber delivery network at a tap of a button to people in India. The wide selection of meal choices delivered at Uber speed will open new economic opportunities for delivery partners, enable restaurants to connect with more consumers and make eating effortless, everywhere and for everyone.” 

Consumers will be able to order seven days a week, round the clock, as long as the restaurants are operational, through the app. The UberEATS app is separate to the Uber app that people use to request a ride and has been built specifically to make food delivery as seamless as possible. 

Kartik Murthy, Product Manager, UberEATS Internationationalisation & Growth, elaborated, “A little over a year ago, we set out to make food delivery – from pizza to smoothies – through the UberEATS app as convenient and reliable as getting an Uber ride. As we have expanded UberEATS, we have been building the technology to make food delivery at the push of a button easy wherever you are – whether it is at home or the park, in Mumbai or San Francisco. That is why we are working specifically to make the challenges in India opportunities for developing a better product for consumers, restaurants, and delivery partners. For example, for consumers, we are using machine learning to surface restaurant recommendations, as well as integrating popular payment options to make transactions easy; for restaurants, we developed a tool – Restaurant Manager – to share actionable data and analytics to help grow their businesses; and for delivery partners, we have built the ability for them to complete trips even when offline in low connectivity areas. We look forward to continuing to learn from our experience in India and build the technology that makes food delivery effortless for everyone.” 

Adgully spoke to Bhavik Rathod and Kartik Murthy to know more about the UberEATS business model, the marketing strategy, strategic partnerships, plans to grow the business, potential in the food business and much more. Excerpts: 

Why is a ride hailing app like Uber venturing into the food delivery business?
Bhavik Rathod: Uber is a technology company where we are essentially trying to solve the problems that come in logistics and food is an interesting space to venture into. Food business provides a massive opportunity. According to some reports, it's a $15 billion unorganised market segment in India alone and that is huge. What we at Uber really get excited about as a technology company is that we find difficult problems and see how we can bring in technologies to solve those problems. We are known globally and in India for moving people from A to B. Now with UberEATS, we can apply all those learnings and technologies to move food from restaurants to consumers. 

What makes the venture UberEATS lucrative for you? What is the business potential that you see?
Bhavik Rathod: Everyone loves food and I am a food lover myself, Being a true Mumbaikar. I’ve been born and raised here eating Pav Bhaji, Vada Pav and Egg Bhurji. I always just wanted to press a button and wished the food would come to me and now being with Uber, we always ask ourselves – if we can deliver cars to people in a few minutes, what else can we do? 

Food feels right and fits perfectly into the equation because there is a massive opportunity in that segment globally. India specifically is a massive market and hence, it was interesting to venture into the food business here. 

Could you elaborate on the new Restaurant Manager analytics tool?
Kartik Murthy: With the Restaurant Manager tool, we want to empower restaurants to grow their business. We don’t want to partner with them just to get them more demand for deliveries, but we want to give them actionable data. So, if a restaurant is trying out a new sandwich in the neighbourhood and they don’t know how well that sandwich is going to perform, they can try it out. They will get detailed analytical data on how that sandwich performed on UberEATS and decide if they want to double down on the sandwich or change the ingredients. We want to provide our restaurant partners with actionable data so they can grow their businesses. 

What about the investments made in the UberEATS business?
Bhavik Rathod: Being part of Uber for over three and a half years, I've seen how Uber has grown in India and how serious it is about India. Uber’s Global CEO Travis Kalanick and Amit Jain, President, Uber India and South Asia for rides business, are both deeply invested into making Uber successful in India and we have done a fantastic job over the years in scaling the rides business. With massive opportunity in the food business in India and the fact that we have hired a team of stellar operational guys, engineers, with Kartik and myself on board with our team who are working tirelessly around the clock behind the scene is an investment in itself. More importantly, India by itself offers a massive opportunity and Uber wants to be a part of that journey to solve that problem. 

In which cities that it will be available?
Bhavik Rathod: As of now, UberEATS will only be available in four areas in Mumbai, but the strategy has always been to first focus on the fundamentals by making sure the application itself is great. UberEATS’ focus is on providing great experience to restaurants, delivery partners and consumers and as we go deeper into the business, we will be available in more geographies in Mumbai and other metro cities as well. But when that will happen is too soon to tell. 

Any tie-ups for this venture?
Bhavik Rathod: UberEATS has tied up with over 200 restaurant partners, including local players like The Bohri Kitchen, Nom Nom, The Bombay Canteen, The Good Wife, Fresh Menu, Le 15, Coffee By Di Bella and global names like Krispy Kreme, Chillies, etc. Going forward, we will continue to add more restaurants on the partner list. 

What is your marketing strategy to grow the UberEATS venture?
Bhavik Rathod: There are few avenues for us to increase our brand presence of UberEATS alone. With this launch, we are announcing that we are entering into the food business in India, starting with Mumbai. We have millions of riders who already use the Uber app. So when a rider opens the Uber app in South Mumbai, they will see a feed cart which gives the user an option to order food. With this, we have riders who can become consumers for UberEATS app. Consumers can also download the new app for iOS and Android from the iTunes/Google play store or go online at ubereats.com. Besides that, we are working with our restaurant partners and our delivery partners through several other avenues of marketing such as online, offline, creative marketing, etc. UberEATS will come up with the same creativity and innovation as Uber to make another brand under the umbrella of Uber popular among the users. 

Kartik Murthy: Inside the rider app, we want to drive utility and not just marketing. People come to Uber for a seamless ride, but we want to show them that there is also a seamless way to get food. We don't want to show that here are some restaurants on the app, we want to show them very targeted restaurants where they can get their food delivered to wherever they are going. If a rider is going home from airport after a long flight, they can get food delivered at their destination. We at Uber always think about the consumers first and so we are building a product that actually works for them rather than just sending them marketing messages. 

What kind of revenues that you are eyeing from UberEATS?
Bhavik Rathod: We charge a certain percentage on the order value as service fee to our restaurant partners, there’s a delivery fee of Rs 15, which is inclusive of taxes. There is no minimum order size and we have a standard market fee that we charge to our delivery partners. 

How do you plan to counter the competition?
Bhavik Rathod: The food industry in itself is a largely uncategorised sector, where the market is huge and we believe that to succeed in this market you need you stand out with your offerings. Uber has great technology, brand presence across geographies and the fact that we already have million of riders on the app who use Uber extensively works in our favour. More importantly, the value that we bring in for our consumers and restaurant and delivery partners allows us to distinguish ourselves and grow in the business. 

With network and connectivity being an issue on both consumer and provider front, how does UberEATS plan to combat that?
Kartik Murthy: UberEATS is doing a lot of interesting stuff to combat network and connectivity issue. On the delivery partner side, we allow them to end the trip when they have no network, which has been a complaint from a lot of delivery partners in markets that have network issues, and we have addressed that issue in our app. On the consumer front, we are doing interesting things around images, because images are the front and centre of our application. We are making sure that if you are on a network which has limited access to connectivity, we deliver the best image for your network so you don’t get a slow experience.

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