Uber Eats is shutting down thousands of virtual restaurants to make the app less spammy
The food delivery app is cracking down on the ghost kitchens that have identical menus.
Uber Eats is delisting some of the delivery-only restaurants on its app to help weed out low-quality listings, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company has confirmed to The Verge that it’s introducing a new set of standards for virtual restaurants that should help cut down on listings that sometimes contain the same menu.
Virtual restaurants, which are also known as ghost kitchens, don’t have a physical location where you can actually sit down and eat. Instead, they’re often run out of existing restaurants, warehouses, and sometimes even parking lots and exist solely to sell food on delivery apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash. While some of these locations are independently run, others belong to larger companies that franchise out their brand to a chain of individual operators, like MrBeast Burger. Uber also offers a virtual restaurant program of its own that helps entrepreneurs start their own ghost kitchens.
But since some of these ghost kitchens are often run by the same company — and sometimes out of the same location — that can lead to repetitive listings, where one restaurant may have different branding but the same exact menu. Those are the type of redundant listings that Uber Eats is cracking down on, as it now requires virtual locations to have menu items that “are at least 60% different” from any other virtual restaurants “operating from that same physical location.” The same goes for the brand’s “parent restaurant,” or the kitchen that houses the virtual brands.
