Uber delivering lunch in Santa Monica
Guess who’s coming to lunch? The ride-sharing company Uber, which has begun testing home-delivery of the midday meal in a pilot program in Santa Monica.
Westside Uber customers, starting this week and running until Friday, September 5, will be able to order a pret-a-manger meal delivered to their door for $12.
Selections, off a prix-fixe uberFRESH menu, will include fresh soups, salads and sandwiches, each delivered within 10 minutes, between 11:30 and 2:30pm.
But it’s only a Westside thing. Deliveries will be made only in a quadrant west of Bundy Drive, south of San Vicente Blvd., north of Rose Avenue, and east of the ocean.
“This is the latest experiment designed to bring Uber users a unique, seamless lunchtime experience that allows them to skip the line and go from hungry to happy in just ten minutes,” said the company’s communications officer Eva Behrend.
If the experiment is successful, the company said, Uber may expand uberFRESH to other LA-area communities.
Uber is making other experiments, too. The company recently announced the hiring of former Obama administration officer David Plouffe to help guide Uber’s interests in local, state and national politics.
Last week, the San Francisco-based startup started inviting Starbucks, Hyatt Hotels, United Airlines, TripAdvisor and restaurant reservation service OpenTable to use a new app to summon Uber cars to their places of business.
Uber isn’t the first company to try something of this nature. In San Francisco, a service called Spoonrocket promises to deliver a healthy, inexpensive, fresh meal, within mere minutes, to addresses within a swatch that stretches from South of Market Street to Berkeley in the East Bay.
In Los Angeles, Eat24 offers delivery of any food, from any restaurant, with certain limits. And, of course, there’s that Pink Dot thing.
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