I’m not the biggest food person. I’m not picky about food and I eat whatever I can get. When I used to work in an office, getting lunch was a problem. If you wanted to get good food, you would have to call and order the food you wanted. After a couple of minutes, you would have to drive to the restaurant and wait because that restaurant or food joint didn’t do delivery. But other food joints did do food delivery but how much can I trust a bike rider to keep the food warm and safe during delivery?
I’ve written a lot of Uber posts and today’s topic is Uber related. Uber has a service called UberEats. It’s currently available in the United States, Europe and Australia. The only African city where UberEats operates in is Johannesburg.
The regular Uber service currently operates in Ghana, specifically in Accra. But I was thinking about this: How successful would UberEats be if it launched in Accra?
Food Partners
In Accra, there are a lot of places that serve a variety of foods. But from my observation, most of them don’t do delivery. Some do delivery and they rely on couriers to deliver food orders to customers.
UberEats could be beneficial to most of these food joints in acquiring customers and getting more revenue.
Signing onto to UberEats is easy. Restaurants go through an onboarding process with UberEats and list their menus and food categories on the app as well as the location of the restaurant.
I don’t know the exact number but UberEats does charge restaurant partners a service fee for food deliveries.
It seems like a no-brainer. Instead of trying to find couriers to deliver food, you just get an Uber driver to deliver it.
Uber Ghana already run a promotion for free waakye to people on the app. There’s no reason why they can’t add places like PizzaHut or Counter Burger to the app and charge a fee to customers.
How The App Works
When you launch the app, you get a menu list and you can specifically search for restaurants or food that you want. After you select your food items and order, you will be given the estimated time that your food will be prepared and delivered. An Uber driver is contacted in that same time to pick up the food when it’s ready and deliver to your location.
I presume you can pay by cash or credit card like the normal Uber service.
And that’s it. Open the app, select your food and your location and pay.
On Demand And Customer Experience
Like I said before, UberEats is currently only available in Johannesburg. But it doesn’t mean that there can’t be an UberEats clone startup in Ghana.
On-demand technology is here to stay. Uber is going strong in many African countries and it seems users have adopted it as the new wave. On-demand food is the next wave. Why can’t I easily order food from a restaurant, track the delivery and automatically be charged when it’s delivered?
One thing that you can do with the UberEats app is to rate the food that you order. So basically, instead of rating your Uber driver, you rate the restaurant or food joint that you ordered from and that affects the restaurant’s overall rating and everyone can see it.
It’s basically a Yelp add-on.
I think most businesses need to start realizing that technology can totally transform their business and get them more customers.
UberEats is a great idea and it has brought forth competitors in other countries. Why can’t a service like that exist in Ghana before UberEats comes in and takes over the market?
Maybe a food startup is working on that and I hope that’s the case. Until then, we will just have to stick with our old ways of eating food.
