Uber’s food delivery service is starting to expand

UberEATS, the newer, standalone app for Uber’s restaurant food-delivery business, is today launching in its first U.S. markets: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The U.S. expansion was announced earlier this year when the app made its initial debut in Toronto. Uber says many more markets are planned to go live on the new app in the near future, too, including Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Seattle and Washington, D.C. New York will be the next to go live on the UberEATS app; its launch is planned for as early as next week. When Uber first expanded into the food-delivery space in 2014, it had users on its flagship application toggling a slider over from ordering a car, like an UberBLACK or UberX, then selecting UberEATS instead. But the company realized that didn’t make sense — requesting a ride and food are different experiences. That’s why it decided to roll out UberEATS as a standalone mobile application. Uber tells us they took a cue from Facebook in terms of how to market the app to users. When Facebook decided to break out Messenger as its own application, it pointed users from the main application to the App Store download for Messenger when they navigated to the app’s “chat” section. Similarly, Uber’s main app has also been used to point people to the App Store download for UberEATS.