Uber Eats has acquired David Chang’s latest operation: Ando, a delivery-only lunch menu that operates out of a couple of industrial kitchens around Manhattan. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. For the time being, Ando will be shuttering operations. The announcement comes roughly six months after Andy Taylor, former head of Hale and Hearty Soups, took over as CEO.
Between June and August of last year, Uber Eats grew its monthly unique users from 2.5 million to 5.3 million, according to data from Verto Analytics. It operates in 200 cities around the world. In July, Uber Eats was earning a profit in 27 of those locations, according to the New York Times. Though food delivery is a hyper competitive market between incumbents like GrubHub and newcomers like Deliveroo and Postmates, Uber Eats has pushed its restaurant analytics platform as a way to attract new business.
“We focus on—here’s how much you sell each day and here’s how that varies every day,” Chetan Narain, a lead product engineer at Uber, told me last year. He said, Uber’s access to a broad spectrum of restaurant data enables restaurants to achieve higher efficiencies. “We benchmark restaurant performance against other restaurants,” he adds.
What the deal with Ando will give the company is further insight into restaurant operations. David Chang and his team of chefs have spent a good chunk of their time figuring out ways to make the kitchen more productive, so food gets out the door faster. Uber will be keen to share what Ando has learned with others.
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