Uber Eats is devouring its food delivery competition

The only other company of the five major online food-delivery apps -- Doordash, GrubHub, Postmates, Seamless, and Uber Eats -- to see growth double year-over-year was Doordash, which grew by 106.4 percent. Postmates, with 41 percent growth, rounds out the top three.

We define “new Uber Eats buyers” as those who used Uber Eats in the last 12 months, but not the year prior. When taking that into account, these new Uber Eats buyers spent 77.7 percent more with Uber Eats in the most recent year than they spent with the other four food-delivery apps in the previous year combined. Overall, new Uber Eats buyers spent 231.5 percent more with these five food-delivery apps in the past year than they did the prior year.

Where Uber Eats gets its advantage is the number of new buyers it enjoys versus the other apps. Uber Eats saw order growth of 196.4 percent year over year, primarily from the growth in buyers. For the sake of comparison, Postmates had a 39.3 percent increase.

New Uber Eats buyers are very loyal to the service. These consumers spent 53.6 percent of their food delivery dollars with Uber Eats, which is far and away the largest breakout. The apps with the next largest percentage from Uber Eats buyers are GrubHub and Seamless, who account for just 16.7 and 11.1 percent of share of total category spending.

In terms of frequency, Seamless appears to have the most repeat buyers. In the past 12 months, Seamless buyers ordered an average of 21.5 times with Seamless, far and away the largest number. Uber Eats saw only 7.7 orders per buyer on average.

Looking at order sizes, Doordash buyers are spending the most money, $36.95, per order in the past 12 months. This is $8.28 more than Uber Eats buyers, further demonstrating that Uber Eats’ recent revenue and order ascendance is driven by the influx of new users.

“Food has been the fastest growing big category for the past two years, including both restaurant delivery and grocery,” said Ken Cassar, principal analyst, Slice Intelligence. “The battle for our bellies is in full swing, and the players that had dominated these categories in the early days of e-commerce aren’t the ones that are winning today. E-commerce has never been a venue for the complacent, more so in food than anywhere else.”

With a panel of over 5.5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time, which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.