Work

U Market: groceries for a food desert

A 0→1 mobile pilot with Uber Eats: an app designed to let people in food deserts order fresh, affordable groceries ahead and pick them up from a truck that stops near them on a schedule.

Company
Uber Eats · er studio
Role
Product manager
Timeline
2019 – 2023
Type
0→1

TL;DR

Problem
U Market was a 0→1 mobile pilot with Uber Eats on healthy-food access in food deserts, one of the pilots Fortune 500 in-house teams outsourced to er studio.
What I did
I was the product manager on the er studio team. The app is designed around a truck schedule: order ahead, pick a stop and a time, meet the truck with the order's barcode.
U Market poster: the headline 'Bring the market 2 U' on a white panel framed by fresh produce, the U market logo at the bottom left, and a phone showing the app's 'Welcome 2 U Market' screen
The poster and the app's first screen: 'Bring the market 2 U', 'Welcome 2 U Market'. · Source: er studio design team

Context & problem

U Market was a 0→1 mobile pilot with Uber Eats on one problem: healthy-food access in food deserts.

Fortune 500 in-house teams outsourced 0→1 pilots to er studio, the product studio I co-founded. On U Market I was the product manager on the er studio team.

Discovery & insight

For a problem like this, the discovery questions that matter are practical ones: how far away fresh food is, when people can get to it, and what they can afford.

Strategy & bets

The app is designed around a schedule rather than a courier. In the design, a U Market truck stops at community pickup points in set time windows, and people order ahead for the stop and the window they pick. A pickup model only works if people can plan around it, so the truck schedule sits inside the ordering flow itself.

Solution

The onboarding walkthrough explains the whole model in three screens. After it, people shop a virtual catalog of fresh produce scoped to their zip code, fill a cart, choose a stop and a time, and check out. The order ends in a barcode screen with the order total and the stop address, to show at pickup.

Walkthrough screen 1: illustration of a person browsing on a bean bag next to a shelf and an order card, headline 'Order food' over 'faster & easier', subtitle 'Browse our virtual catalog of fresh produce and fill your cart on-the-go'
1 · Order ahead
Walkthrough screen 2: illustration of a green U market truck with an awning and a person carrying boxes, headline 'Select Ur pickup' over 'location & time', subtitle 'Select one of our convenient community pickup stops near U'
2 · Pick a stop and a time
Walkthrough screen 3: illustration of a 'U Stop' sign and a person holding a basket next to shopping bags, headline 'Meet the truck' over 'pick up & enjoy'
3 · Meet the truck
The onboarding walkthrough: order ahead, pick a community stop and a time, meet the truck. · Source: er studio design team, final UI

Execution

The poster and the app share one identity: the poster reads “Bring the market 2 U” and shows the app opening on “Welcome 2 U Market”. The wireframes and the final screens follow the same structure.

Validation & results

For a pickup pilot, the signals I judge the work by are whether people who order actually meet the truck, whether they order again for a later stop, and whether the time windows match when they can come.

Reflection

U Market made me treat a pilot like this as one loop: the poster, the app that takes the order, and the barcode at pickup. Each part has to say the same thing in the same voice; here the poster and the app share one identity, down to the “2 U”.