Uber Eats joins crowded Seattle food-delivery field

SEATTLE — If Amazon Prime Now, Peach, BiteSquad and the many other food delivery services operating across the city aren’t quite satisfying people’s latest food craving, they’re in luck. Uber is launching Uber Eats, a lunch delivery service, in several Seattle neighborhoods Wednesday.

Uber Eats will appear as another option within the Uber app, and uses UberX drivers. Customers choose from a menu of several options that change daily. Monsoon, Skillet Diner and Volunteer Park Caf? will be on the menu this week.

Lunch is delivered between 11 a.m., and 2 p.m. in downtown Seattle, Pioneer Square, Belltown, Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union and Capitol Hill. Meals are generally between $8 and $12, plus a $3 delivery fee, which is being waived for the first month.

Uber said the food will be delivered in 10 minutes or less. One of the ways it may be speeding up delivery is by requiring customers to meet drivers curbside. Drivers never leave their cars.

They also never touch the food. The meals are prepared at the restaurants and packaged into containers in bags before the drivers pack them into their cars.

Seattle is the 10th city in which Uber Eats operates. The company enters a crowded field in Seattle, full of delivery businesses clamoring to cater to tech workers happy to trade money for time.

Uber Eats is thought to be part of Uber’s push to become a much broader delivery system, branching far beyond giving people rides, as detailed by TechCrunch.