- Uber Eats is experimenting with short-form videos.
- The video feed, similar to TikTok’s format, shows restaurants preparing their food.
- This feature is currently being tested in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto.
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Short-form video content like TikTok is taking over social media apps.
And soon, you’ll also be able to find it on Uber Eats.
Uber Eats has confirmed to Business Insider that the food delivery platform will be introducing a new feature that will allow app users to scroll through a feed of cooking videos from nearby restaurants.
First reported by TechCrunch Uber Eats senior director of product Awaneesh Verma spoke about the new feature in an exclusive interview on Monday.
Uber Eats says merchants have the option to offer their services to Uber Eats, which will appear in the feed on the app’s home screen as well as in carousels throughout the app.
“This new short-form video feed is designed to help showcase dishes from top merchants, allowing them to attract new consumers and tell the visual story of their meals. is not currently available on other delivery platforms,” said an Uber spokesperson. Yitz told Business Insider.
And, just like on TikTok, hungry users can swipe through a series of vertical clips showing different dishes being prepared at restaurants hand-picked by the Uber Eats team. If users like what they see, they can order that or a similar dish directly from the video screen.
“Early data shows that people are much more confident in trying new dishes and things they wouldn’t otherwise eat,” Verma told TechCrunch. “Even the little things like being able to see the texture and see details about portion sizes and the contents of a dish can be very exciting for users.”
Additionally, because videos are not advertisements, Uber Eats will not charge restaurants to display them within the app, the company said.
The new feature is currently being tested only in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto, but the company plans to eventually roll it out to more cities, a spokesperson told BI.
Uber Eats is the latest company to jump into the short-form video content boom following the success of TikTok.
Instagram first launched Reels in 2020, a move widely seen as a way to catch up with top competitor TikTok. And since then, Meta has made a number of changes to both his Facebook and Instagram, bringing the app’s functionality closer to his TikTok.
Following the success of TikTok, YouTube also created its own TikTok clone called YouTube Shorts, which reached over 50 billion views per day in early 2023.