Yahoo Finance Coffee to your door: Starbucks teams up with UberEats to deliver hot drinks
Starbucks is set to deliver in the UK for the first time with millennial customers willing to double the price of their coffee to avoid leaving their home for a caffeine fix.
The coffee chain announced on Tuesday that it will begin piloting the coffee-to-your-door service in London at the end of the month in a deal with UberEats.
The service, which follows successful trials in the US, will allow customers to order a hot drink from Starbucks on an the UberEats app before it is delivered by Uber’s network of bicycle and motorbike riders.
But customers will pay more for their order. Current UK deliveries through the UberEats app normally add a £2.50 delivery charge, a price that would in effect double the cost of a £2.60 latte. In the US, app orders for coffee add a $2.49 delivery fee.
Starbucks says that around 95 per cent of its menu items will be available through the app.
UberEats has become a popular food delivery service among the millennial generation, who have a taste for smartphone delivery businesses including Uber and Deliveroo over more established services like Just Eat.
Liz Meyerdirk, Uber’s head of business development, told The Daily Telegraph: “We have had people asking for Starbucks delivery for five or six years. Even before UberEats existed, they were asking if Ubers could deliver coffee for them.”
The company declined to comment on the delivery fee for Starbucks in the UK, or the cut it will take from the coffee chain.
Uber reportedly takes a cut in the region of 30pc from most restaurant deliveries, however a similar global deal with McDonalds is understood to offer more lucrative terms to the restaurant chain due to the size of the deal.
Starbucks has long been testing how to build out a delivery service in its home market. In 2014, then-CEO Howard Schultz said the chain would soon begin offering delivery in select US markets.
The trials in London trials add the UK to a list of eleven countries where customers can order Starbucks on their phone.
Starbucks already has a significant delivery business in China, using Alibaba’s Ele.me platform, involving 2,000 stores across 30 cities in China.
The food delivery industry is said to be worth up to £73bn by 2023 and is growing more than 11 per cent per year, mostly driven by delivery apps like UberEats and Deliveroo.
The company's chief operating officer Roz Brewer said: “By integrating our ordering technology directly with Uber Eats, we’ve unlocked the ability to bring Starbucks to customers for those times when they’re not able to come to us.”
The deal represents a win for Uber in London, after it saw its taxi service almost banned by Transport for London. It also represents the latest escalation of the “delivery wars” between US firm Uber and British rivals Deliveroo and Just Eat.
