Thousands of Uber Eats Storefronts Will Disappear From the App This Week

pcmag.com:

Uber Eats is shutting down thousands of storefronts and introducing new guidelines in a bid to stop identical menus flooding its app and overwhelming hungry users.

As The Wall Street Journal(Opens in a new window) reports, regular users of Uber Eats will have noticed a number of virtual brands (brands with no physical stores created purely for food deliveries) offer identical menu options under different names. Many of them are from the same restaurant creating multiple menus to either "game search results" or ensure their food gets seen by more potential customers.

Youtuber Eddy Burback demonstrated how bad the situation has become in his video "The Deceptive World of Ghost Kitchens(Opens in a new window)." He discovered 44 restaurants on Uber Eats all sharing the same address and ending up eating nine identical fish sandwiches ordered from different virtual brands.

There's now over 40,000 virtual brands operating on Uber Eats and the company realized it has a big problem. John Mullenholz, head of dark kitchens at Uber Eats, admitted a lack of rules has created a "Wild West" of businesses competing, which results in app users "effectively seeing 12 versions of the same menu."

The end result, according to Mullenholz, is the erosion of consumer confidence. In response, 5,000 of those virtual brands will disappear from the app this week. New guidelines will also ensure virtual brands must have more than half their menu items differ from those of the parent restaurant who created the brand. Each brand must also include photos of five items that are unique to its menu.

The removal of 5,000 storefronts will have an instant impact, but the new guidelines will have parent restaurants scrambling to create new menu items so as