It’s last call for Drizly, which Uber purchased three years ago.

January 17, 2024

Uber is shutting down the alcohol delivery service Drizly, three years after acquiring the platform for $1.1 billion, the company confirmed.

“After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything—from food to groceries to alcohol—all on a single app,” Pierre Dimitri Gore-Coty, senior vice president of delivery at Uber said in a statement.

The company said that the Drizly brand will be discontinued by March 2024.

Drizly ran independently all this time, and Uber eventually decided to close it, as reported by Axios. At the time of the acquisition in 2021, Uber planned to integrate Drizly into Uber Eats, but never did. Drizly provided backend tech that let local liquor stores provide their own deliveries.

The bigger issue, however, might have been cybersecurity, said Axios. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Drizly to implement new data security measures after hackers stole information from about 2.5 million customers in 2020.

Uber said that consumers prefer using a single app to get multiple types of products delivered. The company also runs Uber Eats, a competitor to food-delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub. In 2020, Uber acquired food-delivery rival Postmates for $2.65 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Uber representatives said the alcohol category on Uber Eats had already doubled globally in the last year, and the Uber Eats app can deliver alcohol to 35 states and more than 25 countries around the world, reported the Washington Post.

Last February, Uber Eats debuted its c-store delivery offer with a Super Bowl ad, offering grocery, alcohol, convenience, flowers, retail and more, and it said that nearly three million consumers order essentials beyond food each month through Uber Eats.