Dive Brief:
- Uber has rebranded and expanded its new grocery delivery service.
- The service, now dubbed UberESSENTIALS, is available only in the Washington, DC, market.
- UberESSENTIALS offers a limited number of non-perishables for delivery, but the number of such products it offers has doubled, and will now include a variety of holiday-inspired items like wrapping paper and batteries.
Dive Insight:
What's interesting here is that Uber apparently decided that only one of the two delivery services it began testing in August is worth keeping. UberESSENTIALS is a bigger version of the product it called Corner Store. The other program, called UberFresh, a meal delivery service that launched a few days after Corner Store, is apparently going dark.
It's too soon to tell, but the decision to go with groceries and not meals may have been one of the first indications of what path Uber will take in food now that it has poached Google's head of same-day delivery services.
