Uber Eats Expands West Coast Grocery, Alcohol Selection to Become More Central to Consumers’ Daily Lives

Uber Eats is expanding its grocery offerings in the West Coast, adding new use cases and embedding its service deeper into consumers’ daily routines.

Uber announced in a Tuesday (Jan. 25) press release that it has added 173 new grocery stores to its marketplace across Arizona, California and Nebraska in partnership with warehouse-style grocery chain Smart and Final, and it has plans to add the grocer’s 81 remaining locations in the future.

The grocer is also the first to sell alcohol through Uber Eats’ marketplace, which is central to Uber’s goals for this partnership, leveraging the ability to deliver alcoholic beverages to consumers’ doors to attract new customers.

With the battle to earn consumers’ restaurant delivery loyalty often neck and neck between leading aggregators, grocery can be a key differentiator.

“Grocery continues to be a rapid area of growth for us this year with millions of consumers ordering groceries and other essentials through Uber each month,” Oskar Hjertonsson, head of Grocery at Uber, said in the release. “By partnering with grocers like Smart and Final, we’re able to meet our customer’s demands for more high-quality products, including alcohol, at value prices delivered seamlessly, right to their door.”

Leading aggregators around the world have been growing their merchant base outside of the restaurant category to encompass grocery and convenience, with these additions allowing third parties to get more use out of their existing network of drivers. Take, for instance, London-based delivery marketplace Deliveroo, which has been expanding its grocery capabilities despite the category’s lower profitability relative to restaurant delivery.

“Grocery’s nearly 100% incremental to our restaurant business, so customers that are ordering groceries — they’re doing that on top of their existing restaurant volume, and it also has benefits on the overall density of the network and smoothing out the work for riders across the day,” Deliveroo Chief Financial Officer Adam Miller told analysts on a call Thursday (Jan. 20) discussing the company’s fourth-quarter 2021 results.

Read more: Deliveroo Uses Grocery, Ghost Kitchens to Make Its Labor Model Work

Research from PYMNTS’ study “What Consumers Expect From Their Grocery Shopping Experience,” created in collaboration with ACI Worldwide, found that 23% of consumers are buying groceries online for home delivery. Plus, 8% of grocery shoppers rank this method as their most preferred. However, the study found that only 11% buy online using an aggregator that delivers the products the same day, and just 2% prefer this method above all others.

See more: Digital Features Can Help Grocers Win Over 43% of Shoppers

Additionally, findings from PYMNTS’ study “Decoding Customer Affinity: The Customer Loyalty to Merchants Survey 2022,” created in collaboration with Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, found that 23% of shoppers would be more loyal to their grocer if said grocer added online purchasing options. Additionally, the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers noted that one in five grocery shoppers said the same of product delivery capabilities.

Get the report: The Customer Loyalty To Merchants Survey 2022