One of the most fraudulent practices on delivery apps is restricted on Uber Eats.
The service spun off from Uber’s ride-sharing app will drastically reduce the number of “virtual restaurants” on its app, according to the the wall street journal(Opens in a new tab). These are delivery-only restaurants that may not have an actual physical home or are listed at the same address as another restaurant because they are actually operated by that other restaurant.
According to the WSJ report, Uber Eats is now home to more than 40,000 virtual restaurants (or “ghost kitchens”), up from just 10,000 in 2021.
The same report gave a few examples of the kinds of things Uber Eats wants removed from the app, like a New York deli listing the same menu under 14 (!!!) different names.
Is your food delivery from a “ghost kitchen”?
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To be clear, Uber Eats only cracks down in extreme cases, with plans to remove around 5,000 of these ghost kitchens from the app.
Creating a virtual restaurant is not only allowed on Uber Eats, but there is a entire webpage(Opens in a new tab) with new official guidelines on how to do so. For example, a virtual restaurant’s menu must be at least 60% different from the menu of its parent restaurant or any other business operating in the same location.
In the meantime, always use Google Maps to find out if the place you are ordering from is real or not.
