mobile food delivery app Uber Eats launches in Kolkata

A food ordering and delivery app, Uber Eats has been launched in Kolkata enabling the gourmet to order food from 250 favourite eating joints on the click of a button. Kolkata is the 11th city in the country to get this facility.

One will have to download the app, view the eating places of his choice and place the order, Bhavik Rathod, head of 'Uber Eats' India, the US-headquartered company's popular food delivery service said.

"With Kolkatans' favourite eating joints - restaurants, sweet shops, confectioners' outlets, fast food joints, coffee shops - on board with Uber Eats, we promise customers quick and reliable delivery so that they can enjoy their favourite food at the comfort of their homes," Rathod added.

Uber Eats app has also made available the schedule a meal option. "If you want to have your dinner at 10, you can schedule it an hour or even a week ahead," Rathod said.

The app also offers customised drop-off within a certain radius. "Say you are in a park and you want your meal delivered at your home, you can just feed in the drop-off address and it will reach there," he said. Some of the other features include tailored restaurant recommendations, where machine learning is used to suggest the customer's favourite eatery or a dish ordered often. There will be a filter for the right food such as vegetarian or quick bites.

After delivery, the user can rate the restaurant and also each item. "We will roll out a restaurant manager app soon and feed it with real-time data such as consumer feedback on meals," Rathod went on adding.

In Mumbai, Uber Eats entered the Indian market in May 2017 and is now present in 11 cities, including Delhi, Gurugram, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Jaipur. Worldwide, Uber Eats is in over 200 cities across 37 countries with over 12,000 restaurant partners. Uber Eats hopes to cash in on the Indian market, which according to Rathod is still nascent.