ChowNow Partners With UberRUSH to Offer Food Delivery

The digital and mobile restaurant order and payment platform adds a delivery option for its clients, and Uber gets further into the food delivery space.

ChowNow, the customizable online ordering and payment platform for restaurants, today announced a partnership with UberRUSH, Uber's delivery and courier service. This collaboration, the first of its kind in the hot mobile food ordering and delivery space, allows ChowNow's clients to instantly add a delivery option. It's a potential plug-and-play solution to restaurant delivery, "a pain point" for many restaurants according to Chris Webb, ChowNow's co-founder and CEO. Webb notes in a release, "At the flip of a switch [our restaurant clients will] be able to tap into a massive network of local delivery drivers and start fulfilling more delivery orders, more efficiently, while at the same time greatly reducing their costs. It's a brilliant opportunity for our clients, which is why we're so thrilled to partner with Uber."

So how does it work? Reached by phone, Webb says the user experience will be seamless: "When someone places an order through one of the apps that is powered by our system or the restaurant's website, the customer doesn't realize that Uber is the delivery partner, they don't realize who is delivering it. The order is sent to restaurant, and at the same time the program connects with Uber to assign a nearby driver to pick up the food. The customer doesn't have to do anything special on their end." ChowNow's app connects with UberRUSH to assign a time for pick up and delivery. A delivery fee is tacked on — "Pricing varies by city, but on average pricing will be $3 per pick up plus $3 per mile, including tip." — and the user can follow their food from pick-up to delivery.

Restaurant food delivery is both a complex issue and a hot topic within the tech space right now. Within the past year, GrubHub, Deliveroo, and Caviar have greatly expanded their current network or begun to integrate food delivery into each platform. Uber launched UberEats; both Groupon and Amazon have dipped their toes into the space and even chef David Chang started a food delivery company.

UberRUSH is currently available in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, and that's where the new food delivery service in partnership with ChowNow will launch. Earlier this year, ChowNow began accepting both Apple Pay and Google Wallet, making it the first restaurant payment service to do so.

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