The modern grocery landscape is undergoing a behavioral shift. While the foundational weekly stock-up trip remains, consumer expectations are increasingly defined by immediacy, forcing retailers to adapt to spontaneous, midweek “top-up” moments.
Beryl Sanders, director of grocery and retail partnerships for Uber, discusses how the e-grocery sector is maturing beyond simple convenience. From leveraging Uber’s rides ecosystem to acquire Gen Z shoppers to deploying artificial intelligence-powered picking tools that preserve consumer trust in fresh produce, Sanders explains how delivery platforms have transitioned from mere operational vendors to essential extensions of a retailer’s core omnichannel brand.
The Packer: Grocery and retail partnerships are shifting as consumers expect reliability and access to fresh products across more moments of their day. How is Uber helping retailers transition from a traditional “weekly stock-up” mindset to captured demand across these spontaneous, micro-moments?
Sanders: The “weekly shop” isn’t going away, but what has changed in the modern commerce era is that consumers now have more ways to shop, allowing them to address immediate needs in between larger planned and regular trips. Maybe they forgot an ingredient for dinner, need a few fresh items midweek or want essentials delivered after work instead of making another stop on the way home. Those are moments retailers would’ve previously missed out on, but on-demand delivery allows them to rise to the occasion.
Uber is focused on helping retailers show up in those real-life moments without disrupting their core business or pulling from existing demand. Because we’re already moving people and things at a global scale, we can connect retailers with consumers when the need is immediate and intent is high. In many cases, these are purchases that simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise — the “top-up” use case barely existed before on-demand delivery made it this easy. Once that convenience exists, it’s hard to go back.
You’ve noted that e-grocery is maturing from a mere convenience add-on into an integrated engine for retailer growth. What does this maturity phase look like in practice, and what separates the retailers who are successfully scaling from those who are just treating delivery as a secondary channel?
The retailers scaling most successfully don’t treat delivery as a bolt-on. They view it as one part of a broader omnichannel system that includes stores, owned e-commerce, marketplace demand, loyalty and fulfillment. That means bringing their full assortment online, using delivery data to understand what’s driving demand and translating what already works in-store into the digital experience — including promotions and offers that give customers a reason to order in the moment.
In practice, maturity means delivery is connected to the rest of the business. Retailers are thinking carefully about assortment, catalog quality, substitutions and how the digital experience reflects the standards customers already associate with their brand.
A good example of what this looks like at scale is the kind of work we’ve done with partners like Albertsons, where loyalty integrations between retailers’ membership programs and Uber’s platform deepen relationships across both the marketplace and their own channels. We’re also seeing more momentum with regional grocers, which is exciting because these are often brands with deeply loyal local customer bases. When their assortment, promotions and fulfillment options show up while customers are already browsing, it creates a new path to meet demand at the point of intent. That’s the maturity signal: when delivery starts reinforcing the retailer’s own brand and customer relationships, rather than competing with them.
Building strong, flexible partnerships in categories like fresh produce is notoriously difficult because quality, availability and consumer trust matter deeply. How does Uber handle the unique operational friction of digital picking and delivery for fresh items so that consumers feel confident skipping the grocery aisle?
Fresh produce is one of the harder categories to get right and also one where you can make or break consumer trust. At Uber, we approach it in layers.
Before an order is placed, digital storefronts need to reflect accurate catalogs, current availability and useful product information. During fulfillment, AI-powered tools help shoppers navigate the picking process efficiently, handle out-of-stocks and make smarter substitutions. Customers can set replacement preferences, receive real-time shopper updates and edit orders easily, giving them control without needing to be in the aisle. We also work closely with retail partners on in-store navigation, and some share store maps and item-level guidance that help shoppers move through the store more accurately.
After delivery, quality has to be backed up. Our Fresh Guarantee is straightforward: quality or your money back. Paired with the trust customers already place in our retail partners and Uber’s speed and reliability, the confidence gap starts to close. The first order is the hardest; after a good experience, people tend to keep coming back.
A large selling point for delivery platforms is helping grocers reach entirely new demographics and create truly incremental demand. Based on Uber Eats’ broader retail momentum, what do we know about who these new digital grocery shoppers are, and how do their shopping behaviors differ from brick-and-mortar loyalists?
Delivery isn’t just shifting where existing customers shop; it’s bringing in people who may not have been regular shoppers with certain retailers before.
This is especially true for younger consumers. Gen Z is significantly over-indexed on our platform: digitally native, outspending previous generations at this life stage and forming habits that tend to grow as their lives do. These shoppers are more comfortable with smaller, frequent orders than a big weekly haul, and they’re often discovering a retailer through delivery before ever setting foot in a store.
Uber also gives retailers access to audiences they may not reach through their own channels. A customer might come to Uber for a ride or restaurant order and discover their local grocer is available; this is a different kind of acquisition path built on existing platform trust. Roughly 30% of first-time delivery customers on our platform start as rides users.
But incrementality isn’t only about new shoppers. It also means unlocking new occasions with existing loyalists. For example, someone who’s shopped at a grocer for years but now uses delivery for a midweek produce top-up or a prepared dinner they wouldn’t have thought to order before.
As you look at the broader momentum of Uber’s grocery and retail ecosystem, what is the biggest friction point you are focused on solving next for your retail partners to ensure these collaborations remain deeply collaborative and mutually profitable?
The biggest friction point isn’t any single operational problem; it’s the gap between what the experience looks like from the outside and how connected everything actually is on the back end. A customer sees one retailer, but behind that is a series of systems: inventory, catalog, fulfillment, substitution logic and pick paths that all have to work together for the experience to feel seamless.
Closing that gap means tighter inventory signals, smarter substitutions, more efficient pick paths and integrations that fit retailers’ existing operations rather than asking them to rebuild around ours. There’s also no one-size-fits-all model here; some partners are focused on marketplace discovery, some on first-party delivery, some on loyalty and many on all of it at once. Flexibility is essential.
Underlying all of it is how we think about partnership: Uber isn’t a competitor to a retailer’s customer relationship, and we’re not a vendor sitting outside of it. We’re an extension of their brand. The partnerships that perform best are the ones where we’re embedded in how a retailer thinks about their overall customer experience, not just their delivery channel.
