Uber Buys the Office Catering Order for $2.3 Billion

Uber Eats is buying ezCater, the workplace catering platform, for $2.3 billion in cash, and the math says Uber just decided the office lunch order is worth more than it looks. ezCater built its whole business on the occasion Uber's consumer app never touched: 140,000 restaurant partners feeding conference rooms and all-hands meetings, a category Uber had never bothered to own outright.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi framed it as scale, not novelty: "Catering is a big business...we can bring that experience to millions more customers," folding ezCater into both Uber Eats and Uber for Business rather than running it as a side project. ezCater CEO Nihad Rahman's exit line, "We're thrilled to be joining forces with Uber," is the standard send-off, but the $700 million premium over ezCater's last private valuation of $1.6 billion says this was not a fire sale.

The real bet here is habit transfer. Uber already owns the on-demand, one-person, impulse half of food delivery; ezCater owns the planned, many-people, recurring half. Put them under one roof and Uber is not just adding restaurant partners, it is adding a calendar: corporate catering runs on repeat orders tied to meetings nobody can move, which is a stickier kind of recurring revenue than another night of delivery-app roulette.

Source: The Boston Globe

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →