Uber, giant in the reservation of cars with driver, entered a new sector on Monday by announcing that it will offer Canadians living in Ontario the possibility of ordering cannabis products, a first for the company.
In addition to food or drinks that can be ordered on the Uber Eats app, customers in the province, which includes the capital Ottawa and the city of Toronto, will now be able to purchase marijuana.
They will then have to pick up their order from the stores of Tokyo Smoke, a legal cannabis dealer with 50 stores in Ontario, owned by Canopy Growth. Orders will be fulfilled “within an hour of purchase,” Uber promised in a statement.
To access the Tokyo Smoke store on the Uber Eats app, consumers will need to search for the word “cannabis” and then confirm their age before a menu appears to select which products to purchase.
The partnership between Uber Eats and Tokyo Smoke, “a world first for a delivery company,” should help “fight the underground illegal market” which, according to the company, is responsible for “more than 40% of non-medical sales to country wide ”.
In October 2018, Canada became the first G7 country to legalize the use of recreational cannabis.
The proportion of Canadians buying their cannabis on the black market fell sharply last May, from 51.3% at the start of 2018 to 35.4% at the end of 2020, according to Statistics Canada.
With The Canadian Press