Uber Eats Is Removing Thousands Of Restaurant Menus For One Reason

If you've used a food delivery app at all recently, you may have noticed something slightly ... suspicious. For some people, the number of pizza, burger, and hot chicken places with whimsical names like MrBeast Burger and HotBox vastly outnumber the actual restaurants lining the streets. These are ghost kitchen brands, and while at first it might seem like a good thing that there are suddenly so many new options for take-out, the truth is that these ghost kitchens operate out of existing restaurant kitchens. Sometimes, they even offer the exact same menu items under different names. It can be frustrating to search for a place to get dinner, only to realize that five out of the eight burger restaurants listed all have the same menu and address. 

Thankfully, one app is doing something about the ghost kitchen epidemic. Uber Eats is going to be removing thousands of restaurants from the app this week (via Wall Street Journal). Many online-only restaurant listings will be taken down, in hopes of cleaning up the app and getting rid of ghost kitchens masquerading as different eateries, like one NYC deli that sold its menu under 14 different restaurant names. How did it get this bad? It all goes back to coronavirus.

Ghost kitchens made sense during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, when many restaurants were trying to make money and stay open however they could when dining in wasn't an option. The Uber Eats head of "dark kitchens" (another name for ghost kitchens) told Nation's Restaurant News that, "We wanted to make sure that all restaurants on Uber Eats had the flexibility to experiment in this space." But things have changed, and now the number of ghost kitchens on the app has soared to 40,000, four times as many as in 2022.

But virtual brands won't disappear entirely. Instead, Uber Eats is implementing a new restaurant certification program for online-only eateries. Some of the new rules will include that both the virtual restaurant and "parent" restaurant need to maintain a rating of 4.3 or higher; the menu of the virtual restaurant will need to be 60% different; and the frequency at which virtual brands can be created will be limited. Between these measures, and removing about 5,000 existing virtual restaurants that don't fill these requirements, Uber Eats hopes to make it easier for customers who want takeout, but not from their least-favorite restaurant concealed behind a different name.