- Uber Eats is experimenting with short-form videos.
- The video feed, similar to TikTok’s format, will showcase restaurants preparing their food.
- The feature is currently being tested in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto.
Short-form video content à la TikTok is taking over social media apps.
And soon, you’ll even find it on Uber Eats.
The food delivery platform is launching a new feature that will allow app users to scroll through a feed of food videos from nearby restaurants, Uber Eats confirmed to Business Insider.
TechCrunch first reported the new feature on Monday in an exclusive interview with Uber Eats’ Senior Director of Product, Awaneesh Verma.
The video snippets, which merchants will have the option to provide to Uber Eats, will appear in a feed on the app’s home screen as well as in carousels throughout the app, Uber Eats said.
“This new short-form video feed, designed to help showcase dishes from top merchants, allows top merchants to attract new consumers and tell a visual story of their meals, which currently isn’t available on other delivery platforms,” a spokesperson for Uber Eats told Business Insider.
And just like on TikTok, a hungry user will be able to swipe through a series of vertical clips showing a variety of dishes being prepared at restaurants handpicked by the Uber Eats team. If the user likes what they see, they can order that dish, or similar dishes, directly from the video screen.
“The early data shows people are much more confident trying new dishes and trying things that they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Verma told TechCrunch. “Even little things like being able to see texture, and the details of what a portion size looks like, or what’s in a dish, has been really inspiring for our users.”
And because the videos aren’t advertisements, Uber Eats won’t charge restaurants to display them in the app, the company said.
The new feature is currently only being tested in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto, but the company plans to eventually roll it out to more cities, the spokesperson told BI.
Uber Eats is just the latest company to get in on the short-form video content craze, following the success of TikTok.
Instagram first launched Reels in 2020, a move that was widely seen as a way to keep up with its top competitor, TikTok. And in the years since, Meta has made a number of changes to both Facebook and Instagram to make the apps function a bit more like TikTok.
In the wake of TikTok’s success, YouTube also created its own TikTok clone, called YouTube Shorts, which at the beginning of 2023 surpassed 50 billion daily views.
