UberEats has become a surprise standout for Uber; the company says the food delivery service is profitable in 27 of the 108 cities where it's offered
SAN FRANCISCO — For years, Bob Gordon, the owner of Footprints Cafe in Brooklyn, handled the delivery of his restaurant's meals …
Context & Ripple Effects
UberEats began as a lunch-only add-on before Uber committed to a dedicated app and full dinner service across ten US cities in early 2016 (the Q1 expansion that included NYC, LA, Chicago, and Austin). Eighteen months later, the unit is profitable in 27 of 108 cities — the first hard evidence that the dense-courier model can pay for itself rather than burn ride-hailing subsidies.
That matters because the profitability claim lands just as the competitive field hardens: research cited in later coverage shows Uber Eats climbing from 3% of US food delivery in 2016 to 24% by 2018, while DoorDash and GrubHub each still book more sales. The Brooklyn angle is literal — owner-operated restaurants like Footprints Cafe are the supply side handing delivery over to the platform.
First-order effects
- Restaurants like Bob Gordon's Footprints Cafe shift delivery labor and margin to Uber's network, trading control of the customer relationship for demand they cannot generate alone.
Second-order effects
- GrubHub and DoorDash face a rival whose losses are now concentrated in 81 unprofitable cities rather than spread everywhere, forcing them to compete on density in exactly the markets where Uber has already broken even.
Third-order effects
- If city-level profitability keeps spreading, food delivery becomes a second logistics network layered on Uber's driver base — later extended with vertical integration via the Ando acquisition and new take-rate layers like the in-app ads business, moving the unit from cost center toward profit engine.
The trend: Ride-hailing platforms are converting their driver-and-dispatch infrastructure into multi-category delivery networks, with food as the first category to reach standalone profitability.