Uber launches food delivery service in Spain following ban on taxi services

Controversial app-based taxi company Uber has opened a new food delivery service in Barcelona, two months after it was banned from operating taxi services in Spain.

UberEats is a new service available to Barcelona, working in collaboration with Plateselector, a Barcelona food guide website. The service already exists in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, where it is known as UberFresh.

"In the same time it takes you to walk up Las Ramblas you can open up your Uber app, choose your meal and get it delivered to an address of your choice," Uber writes in a blog post.

The new service is promising to deliver meals to customers in under 10 minutes, but users need to choose from a selection of lunch and dinner meals on the app, available on both Android and iOS, that are decided by Plateselector and local restaurants in Barcelona.

And similar to the taxi app where little taxi icons and exact timings are constantly available due to GPS tracking, users will be able to watch their meal arriving in real time.

Uber was banned by Spain in December 2014 when a judge ruled that the service posed unfair competition to existing taxi services.

In addition to being ordered to shut the service down, the court also ordered Spanish telecom companies to block any online connections to Uber.com from both the web and through Uber's app.

Although Uber had previous ignored similar complaints from authorities in other countries, the firm said that it was looking to develop new options with Spain and would take the ban seriously.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the ban went into force Uber released updated versions of its app that included workarounds enabling users to still access the system to book taxi's, only going through a different web address.

To this day, it is still possible to book an Uber in Spain this way.

Nevertheless, UberEats could offer the firm a chance to get back into Spain's good books, and it could prove to be a useful service for the many hungry tech journalists descending on Barcelona in March for Mobile World Congress 2015.