Made from scratch: Toronto tech leaders reflect on 10 years of building Uber Eats

In 2015, Uber was not yet synonymous with food delivery. Back then, it was a company known for helping move people, not food.

Toronto was one of the first cities where that would change.

On its path to becoming the world’s most used food delivery platform, Uber Eats has moved through distinct phases defined by experimentation, systemization, and hypergrowth. At each stage, its development in Toronto shaped how the global product adapted and thrived.

This is the story of that journey, told by the General Managers who guided Uber Eats through its defining eras over the past decade.

The lunchtime experiment

Bowie Cheung joined Uber in the spring of 2015, when UberX was scaling rapidly, regulatory debates were front-page news, and food delivery was still an open question inside the company. It lived within a small, experimental team called Uber Everything, which was tasked with exploring what else Uber’s infrastructure could support beyond rides.

At the time, the service was called Uber Eats Instant, a lunchtime experiment in which restaurants prepped fixed quantities of a single menu item, meals were preloaded into cars, and delivery was limited to short windows. 

“Everyone kind of went into overdrive. We were spinning up a marketplace from scratch.”

With its vibrant restaurant culture and high urban density, Toronto was among the first cities chosen to test the idea. The city had built a reputation inside Uber for consistently outperforming expectations across its products, driven by scrappy, resourceful teams willing to try anything. Uber’s goal was to get a signal, and Toronto delivered. 

“If the product was successful in Toronto, you had a good amount of confidence that it could be successful in many other major cities in North America as well,” Cheung said.

Uber Eats Instant’s early test proved that local restaurants were eager to explore delivery as a growth channel, drivers were excited about the additional work, and Torontonians were hooked on the novelty and convenience of the service. But the experiment also revealed to Cheung just how early the industry was in its journey toward delivery at scale. 

“Culturally, the world was in a different place 10 years ago around technology in the kitchen and food delivery,” he said. “There were also no established norms around how to even pick up food from a restaurant.”

Much of the infrastructure now taken for granted had yet to be built, and much of the work was still being done manually in spreadsheets. But by late summer, Uber’s global leadership decided the experiment warranted a larger bet. The decision sparked a 100-day sprint at the company’s Toronto office—then a small outpost that paved the way for Uber choosing the city as a location for one of its 12 global tech hubs—to build a standalone Uber Eats app. 

“Everyone kind of went into overdrive for three and a half months to hit this very ambitious goal,” Cheung recalled. “We were spinning up a marketplace from scratch.”

When the app went live in Toronto that December, demand quickly outpaced expectations. 

“It was a crazy week, because right out the gate, there was just a lot more demand than we were originally anticipating, which was exciting, but also overwhelming,” Cheung said.

Toronto was the first real test for Uber Eats. And it passed.

“Order up!”

By the time Dan Park was named General Manager in 2016, Uber Eats was growing fast. The launch had proven demand, but the team had yet to prove whether the app could be profitable.

“[Uber co-founder and then CEO] Travis Kalanick basically came to us and said, ‘Look, we’re spending significantly. Someone needs to come in and prove to me that this is actually a sustainable business model,’” Park said. “Within eight weeks, we did it.”

In addition to proving market viability, which the team did by standardizing restaurant fees and refining the unit economics of the business, Park was also tasked with expanding Uber Eats rapidly across Canada. Under his leadership, the team launched in major cities and smaller markets alike, including one coordinated rollout into 30 cities in a single day. The pace forced the Toronto team to build processes while the business was already in motion.

“Every time you double a business, everything breaks,” Park said. “Breaking was something we viewed as a good sign. If stuff was breaking, that meant we were testing the limits of the business.”

Under Park, the Toronto team also helped expand what Uber Eats could deliver. Anchored by early partners such as Village Juicery, La Cubana, Japango, and Fresh Kitchen + Juice Bar, the platform later expanded to include national franchises such as McDonald’s, which only increased order volume. 

Under Park’s leadership, Uber Eats had shown it could grow quickly and economically. Next on the agenda was sustained growth.

Setting the table

That task fell to Faye Pang, who took over in 2019 as the business entered a more complex phase. Uber Eats was now operating across dozens of Canadian cities, with growing enterprise partnerships and rising operational demands across its three-sided marketplace of restaurants, drivers, and the hungry masses. 

“Competition was also starting to get pretty fierce,” Pang said. “So we were really doing dives on a daily basis on how we were stacking up against competitors, existing and new.”

As someone who had worked on Uber Eats since its early days, Pang had seen firsthand how quickly the business had grown, and how necessary it was to focus on turning Uber Eats into a well-oiled machine.

“It was really about building those scalable systems and levelling up how we thought about the scalability and the stability of the business,” she said.

During her tenure, Uber Eats expanded co-marketing programs that empowered restaurants to take a more active role in how they promoted themselves on the platform. The team also shifted toward weekly and daily operating rhythms, with clearer systems to address supply, demand, and service levels across dozens of cities at once.

Toronto remained the testing ground for the work that would shape Uber Eats in Canada. Pang pushed the team to raise their hands for new tools and experiments. 

“We wanted one of the first thoughts at global HQ to be: ‘Let me ping someone on the Toronto team,’” Pang said.

Pressure cooker

Lola Kassim took over leadership of Uber Eats in Canada in early 2020 with a mandate to drive sustainable growth. Only weeks later, the world shut down.

“Things ramped up quite a bit after that,” Kassim said.

As pandemic lockdowns spread across the country, restaurants that had relied on in-person dining were suddenly forced to close or pivot, and Uber Eats became one of the fastest ways for them to keep operating. 

“Our priority was: ‘How do we help as many restaurants as possible get onto Uber Eats?’”

Kassim noted that teams often worked seven days a week to onboard restaurants, set up menus, and get delivery running for businesses that had never relied on it before.

The product had to keep pace with pandemic demand, which meant features were pushed out quickly, like contactless delivery and new pickup options. “We were rolling out new initiatives week after week,” Kassim said. 

Demand for groceries, alcohol, retail, convenience, and even cannabis started as people grew used to solving everyday problems through the app.

The rapid growth driven by the pandemic came with its own set of pressures. Tight-knit teams were suddenly remote, managing the emotional weight of the moment at home.  

“It was one of the highlights of my career, being able to work with and motivate this large, energetic team to help support our restaurant industry,” Kassim said. “The work we were doing mattered, and that’s what kept the team going.”

The everyday delivery app

What began as a pandemic response has evolved into an essential part of Canadians’ weekly routines. “Consumers now expect that whatever they need should be just a tap away, and that preference is here to stay,” said Kassim.

In response, Uber Eats invested heavily in expanding beyond restaurant delivery and now boasts a robust retail business, partnering with brands such as Loblaws, Sephora, and PetSmart. 

“Every time you double a business, everything breaks. That meant we were testing the limits of the business.”

Over the last two years, Kassim’s team has expanded into smaller cities and towns nationwide, following a challenge by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to prove national scale was possible, even in sparse geographies. Uber Eats now operates in more than 400 cities, reaching over 85 percent of the Canadian population, including Whitehorse and Yellowknife. The strategy has since become a global playbook for expansion. 

Combined with continued investment in merchants, consumers, and delivery people, this growth has positioned Uber Eats as Canada’s leading delivery platform, with over one billion orders since launch.

The next decade

As Uber Eats enters its second decade, several of the leaders who helped build the business in Toronto have moved on to run companies of their own. Cheung, now leading San Francisco-based Pepper as CEO, remembers the early days of Uber Eats as defined by intensity and conviction. “It was an awesome culture,” he said. “It was super high energy.”

Park, now CEO of Toronto-based Clutch, remembers an environment that trusted people to act early and learn fast. “We really had a culture of experimentation, a ‘get shit done’ kind of attitude,” he added. “People really took ownership to go and build, and because everything was on the table, that made it really fun.”

For Pang, now the Chief Growth Officer at FreshBooks, the Uber Eats team experience carried on into future opportunities. “I’m really proud of the community that we fostered, where those folks have taken their careers, the lessons we all collectively learned and then brought to all these other amazing organizations across not just Canada, but the world,” she said.

Kassim sees the same energy from the current Uber Eats team shaping what comes next. “We’re working on the most interesting challenges with some of the most brilliant people,” she said. “And we’re having fun doing it.”

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All photos provided by Uber.