Uber Eats is the largest food delivery service in the world outside of China, but it’s still unprofitable. The rideshare app Uber filed an updated prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week ahead of its highly anticipated IPO which seeks to raise roughly $10 billion. The document details the state of Uber’s current business, including the strategy behind its three-year-old, money-sucking restaurant delivery platform.
Although Uber Eats brought in $7.9 billion in gross bookings for 2018, the tech company says that in some cases it was paying the delivery drivers more than the actual delivery fees it was charging customers. Uber says that electing to take a loss on deliveries for large chain partnerships such as McDonald’s has also cut into its bottom line. “We charge a lower service fee to certain of our largest chain restaurant partners on our Uber Eats offering to grow the number of Uber Eats consumers, which may at times result in a negative take rate…considering amounts collected from consumers and paid to Drivers,” the company writes.