Three years after acquisition, Uber is shutting down the Drizly alcohol delivery service – to focus on it’s core Uber Eats business, says the company’s delivery head on Tuesday.
Thanking the Drizly team for contributing to the alcohol delivery industry, Uber says it’ll continue to deliver alcohol on it’s Eats app, while only killing the Drizly standalone app.
Drizly Alcohol Delivery is No More
One of the many things Uber Eats delivers is alcohol, via it’s Drizly integration, which has a wide range of distribution networks. Aside from supporting Uber Eats, Drizly also maintained a standalone app for serving it’s dedicated customers.
Acquired by Uber in 2021 for around $1.1 billion, Drizly was described in it’s SEC filing as a service that “works with thousands of local merchants to provide consumers with an incredible selection of beer, wine, and spirits with competitive, transparent pricing“.
While it’s fairly successful, Uber decided to shut down the Drizly standalone app and serve it’s customers from it’s own app – Uber Eats alone. Talking to Axios about this, Uber’s SVP of delivery, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, said: “We’re grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer”.
Though Uber stated shutting down Drizly is to focus on it’s core Uber Eats business, Drizly’s past cybersecurity issues could have played a role, too, in it’s closure. The alcohol delivery service confirmed a data breach in 2020 that exposed the PII of 2.5 million customers.
After Uber’s acquisition, the FTC found that Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas was alerted about the company’s security issues in 2018. Still, he didn’t do enough to mitigate them, resulting in a data breach. Drizly was then ordered to destroy any customer data it collected that was useless to it’s services and to refrain from managing them in the future.
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