Uber rolls out food delivery service Uber Eats in Ukraine

U.S. taxi tech startup Uber launched on Feb. 6 its food delivery service Uber Eats in Ukraine’s capital.

Via a separate Uber Eats mobile app or through the company’s website, one can now order food in Kyiv. The delivery works from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. in central Kyiv, namely across Shevchenkivsky, Podilsky, Pechersky, and Solomensky districts.

So far, Uber has partnered with 200 restaurants in Kyiv, including Mimosa Brooklyn Pizza, Milk Bar, Musafir, Gogi, and Bistro Bistro. The company aims to deliver food within 35 minutes but admits that at the moment deliveries will take longer than that.

“Some time ago we made a revolution in how people move around the city, and now we want to transform the way people enjoy food,” Uber Eats Ukraine CEO Anton Shulyk said in a statement on Feb. 6.

In order to promote the service here, Uber Eats offers free deliveries until the end of February with a promo code, HELLOKYIV, which can be used for an unlimited number of times. Uber’s main competitor in the delivery business in Kyiv, a company called Glovo, has already mirrored the perk, also offering free deliveries for this period. Without the promo code, Uber Eats services cost $1 regardless the size of the delivery.

Ordering food, the app’s users can comment on the order asking, for example, for particular ingredients not to be included. Orders can be planned from an hour to a week in advance. To cancel an order, one has to contact tech support. The app, as in its taxi twin, allows users to trace the process of delivery in real time, showing couriers on a Kyiv map.

Local restaurants that want to work with the service can apply for partnership on the Uber website. To become a courier, in turn, one has to contact Uber Drive, a partner of Uber that handles hiring. Uber Drive also rents bicycles, one of the most popular forms of transport for couriers.

Online food ordering service Uber Eats launched globally in 2014. The service works by sending an Uber driver or a courier to pick up food selected by the user online. Delivery costs from $4 to $5 (up to Hr 140) in the United States. Uber Eats is available in 400 cities and works with 160,000 restaurants. Uber Eats has proved handy for restaurants with no in-house delivery crew.

Uber Eats now accounts for 15 percent of the U.S. company’s revenue worldwide, which is about $1.5 billion, according to CB Insights. This makes the delivery service the most lucrative among Uber’s services.

It was known that Uber Eats planned to come to Ukraine since last February, when the company posted a vacancy on its website, looking to hire a general manager in Kyiv to “scale our food delivery platform in one of our key markets globally.”

Uber first rolled out its taxi service in Ukraine in June 2016, starting with its most popular low-cost private car services, UberX.

Over the 31 months of its presence in Ukraine, Uber has launched in seven of Ukraine’s cities: Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhya, and Vinnytsia. In this sphere, the company is competing with a Ukrainian rival called Uklon, which still occupies a bigger share of the market.