Burger giant teams up with UberEats to launch trial of McDelivery service in parts of London, Nottingham and Leeds

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Fancy a Big Mac but just can’t be bothered to get up off the sofa? McDonald’s has finally answered your prayers– if you live in parts of London, Nottingham and Leeds at least.

The fast food giant has launched its long-awaited “McDelivery” trial in the UK after teaming up with Uber’s food delivery service, UberEats.

McDonald’s will offer the service from 22 outlets across the capital and another 10 restaurants in Leeds and Nottingham – although customers will have to live within a 1.5 mile radius of a restaurant.

Customers can place orders through the UberEats app between 7am and 2am.

Claude Abi-Gerges, a McDonald’s franchisee who has five London outlets taking part in the trial, said the service would offer a “new level of convenience” to fit around customers’ busy lives.

McDonald’s said it would be monitoring the trial closely to see whether it proved popular.

Mathieu Proust, general manager of UberEats, said the trial would let people “get the food they want” quickly and reliably.

The launch comes after KFC launched home deliveries from 30 outlets in greater London via the Just Eat platform earlier this year.

Growth in the number of ready-to-eat food deliveries was stronger than that for the broader eating out market last year, according to analysts at NPD Group.

The McDonald’s move follows similar tie-ups with Uber in the US, while the chain already delivers in China and Singapore.

Early last year the company said it would experiment with table service and cooked-to-order gourmet burgers at hundreds of UK restaurants, in a bid to head off competition from upmarket rivals such as Byron.

In April McDonald’s said quarterly profits rose by a better than expected 8% to $1.21bn, despite a 3.9% fall in revenue to $5.68bn. Operating costs dropped nearly 12%.

Sales at US restaurants open for more than a year rose 1.7% in the three months to March 2017.

The increase comes after the chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, who is British, launched a turnaround plan involving slashing overheads, weeding out underperforming restaurants, offering the breakfast menu all day and switching US restaurants to chicken raised without human antibiotics.