Uber Will Now Deliver Hot Meals

Uber, the wildly successful ride-sharing service, has generated as many foes of its aggressive business practices as it has generated fans of its ease and convenience.

Whether it’s a force for good or evil, it’s a force to be reckoned with. And it’s poised to expand its disruptive ways beyond the taxi realm, into meal-delivery services.

The company launched uberFresh in August, delivering meals from a handful of popular restaurants “in under 10 minutes” to customers on the west side of Los Angeles. Since then, the coverage area has been expanded to include Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

At this point, the service is available during lunch and dinner hours, and is limited to a single menu item every weekday. For today, for instance, the dinner meal is a grilled steak sandwich (skirt steak, gruyere, dijon, and pickled shallots, served with a side of mac and cheese) from STK, a high-end steakhouse. Price: $17, plus a $3 delivery charge.

UberFresh isn’t the first online meal-delivery service. GrubHub and a slew of smaller companies are already well established in the space. But Uber would seem to be especially well positioned to make a success of it, with its enormous fleet of cars and passionate customer base. The $3 delivery charge is reasonable, and its transparency will be preferred by many to the tipping-optional policies typical of other such services.

Reader Reality Check

Would you order dinner from uberFresh if the service were available in your neighborhood?

This article originally appeared on FrequentFlier.com.