Costco’s UK warehouses are likely to appear on at least one on-demand delivery marketplace, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, by March 31, 2027. The base case is Uber Eats first, because Uber already runs Costco storefronts in six countries outside the United States and this week extended that footprint to 47 US states. The pattern of the past eight months points to a retailer that has stopped treating same-day delivery as a North American experiment and started treating it as a per-country checklist, and the UK is now the largest box on that list left unticked.
In short
- Prediction: Costco UK, currently 29 warehouses with no on-demand marketplace listing we can find, likely lands on Uber Eats or Deliveroo (DoorDash) by March 31, 2027; the base case is Uber Eats first, with Deliveroo a plausible second entrant during 2027.
- Signal 1: On September 16, Uber expanded Costco delivery from 17 to 47 US states and nearly 600 warehouses, and described the deal as building on a “global partnership” already live in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, France and Spain.
- Signal 2: On September 17, DoorDash went nationwide with Costco in the US and listed its own Costco footprint as Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland and Puerto Rico; two of those markets run on DoorDash’s Wolt brand, which shows the group deploys Costco through acquired subsidiaries.
- Signal 3: Deliveroo, DoorDash’s UK arm, has spent the last month signing UK non-food retailers (Robert Dyas across 90 stores on August 19, Hotel Chocolat on September 9) while DoorDash reorganizes international teams “around functional areas, rather than brands.”
- Counter-signal: Costco’s UK e-commerce still runs a five-to-seven-day delivery model, and the company may prefer to extend its own Instacart-powered “sameday” sites (as it did in France and Spain in January) rather than hand its UK member list to a third-party app.
Why this matters now
Costco spent most of a decade with one same-day partner in one region: Instacart in the United States from 2017, later extended to Canada. That single-partner posture has come apart in eight months. In January the company launched its first same-day websites in France and Spain with Instacart, in mid-September Uber Eats went to 47 US states, and a day later DoorDash switched on every US warehouse.
The timing is not incidental. Costco reports fiscal 2026 results on September 24, and its chief executive Ron Vachris told analysts in May that same-day delivery is “growing at an even faster rate than our digital business overall.” The August sales release put digitally enabled comparable sales up 17.9% against a total company comp of 8.4%, which is the kind of gap that gets a line item its own strategy. Our preview of what Costco’s fourth quarter needs to show on September 24 sets out why the digital number will get more attention than the headline comp this time.
The reason a UK reader should care is arithmetic. Per Costco’s September 2 monthly sales release, the company operates 939 warehouses: 647 in the US and Puerto Rico, 115 in Canada, 43 in Mexico, 37 in Japan, 29 in the UK, 20 in Korea, 15 in Australia, 14 in Taiwan, seven in China, five in Spain, three in France, two in Sweden, and one each in Iceland and New Zealand. Once you strike out every country where Uber Eats, DoorDash or Instacart already delivers from Costco, the UK is the biggest remaining market by warehouse count, and the only one of the top five where both Uber Eats and a DoorDash-owned brand already operate at scale.
Signal 1: Uber’s “global partnership” language and the 17-to-47-state jump
On September 16, Uber announced that Costco delivery on Uber Eats now covers 47 states and nearly 600 warehouses, up from 17 states. Members enter their Costco membership number on the storefront page or at checkout, member pricing is preserved on the marketplace, and orders can be tracked in real time as they are shopped and delivered. The relationship began as a 25-location pilot in Texas in 2021, so this is a five-year ramp that only reached national scale this month.
Two details matter more than the state count. First, the release explicitly frames the US expansion as building on a global partnership, with “hundreds of Costco locations already available on Uber Eats in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, France and Spain.” That is six of Costco’s thirteen international markets, and it means Uber has already solved the operational problems that make warehouse-club delivery awkward: membership verification inside the app, bulk basket sizes, and a shopper fleet that can navigate a 15,000-square-meter box. Those are exactly the problems a UK launch would otherwise need to solve from scratch.
Second, the deal turns each company’s membership base into an acquisition channel for the other. Eligible Costco members get 50% off an annual Uber One membership in year one and 20% off after that; Uber gift cards worth $100 sell at $79.99 in Costco warehouses and on Costco.com for a limited time; and consumers can buy a Costco membership inside Uber Eats and take 30% off their first eligible Costco order. Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s president and chief operating officer, said the nationwide partnership “demonstrates the scale and opportunity Uber can bring to retailers looking to meet more of consumers’ everyday shopping needs.” Cross-membership mechanics like these are portable; the same offer structure works in sterling. For the underlying unit economics of who pays for the pick and the mile, see our explainer on who actually makes money in grocery delivery.
Signal 2: DoorDash goes nationwide and shows its subsidiary playbook
The following day, September 17, DoorDash announced that Costco members can order from all US warehouses through the DoorDash app for same-day delivery, with access to more than 4,000 products from the local warehouse. Trade coverage put the footprint at nearly 630 locations across 47 states and the District of Columbia. DoorDash’s release described the US launch as “the latest expansion” of a global relationship that “already spans Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland and Puerto Rico.”
That country list is the tell. Sweden and Iceland are not DoorDash-branded markets; they are Wolt markets, the Helsinki-based platform DoorDash acquired in 2022. In other words, DoorDash’s Costco relationship already runs through an acquired European brand with its own app, its own courier fleet and its own local management.
DoorDash completed its acquisition of Deliveroo in 2025, and Deliveroo is the group’s brand in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Belgium and several Gulf and Asian markets. If a Costco deal can be executed through Wolt in Stockholm, the structural barrier to executing one through Deliveroo in London is low.
DoorDash’s own second-quarter shareholder letter, published August 5, reinforces this. The company said it now operates across 40 international countries, that it is “building a single global technology platform” it expects to be fully rolled out in the first half of 2027, and that it is “reorganizing certain international operating groups around functional areas, rather than brands.” It also reported that year-over-year growth in Marketplace GOV at Deliveroo accelerated in the quarter, and that its US grocery and retail categories are on track to become gross-profit positive in the second half of 2026. A grocery-and-retail business that has just crossed into gross profit in its home market is the kind that gets exported. Our July piece on why another scaled delivery player was likely to lose its independence argued that the survivors would compete on retail breadth rather than restaurant count; the Costco deals are that thesis playing out.
Signal 3: Deliveroo is building the UK retail rail in real time
The third signal comes from the UK side of DoorDash. On August 19, Deliveroo announced an exclusive partnership with Robert Dyas, the Theo Paphitis-owned homewares chain, putting roughly 6,000 products from 90 stores onto the app with delivery “in as little as 10 minutes.” It was Robert Dyas’s first move into on-demand delivery. Deliveroo’s own newsroom framed it as a continuation of retail growth on Deliveroo Shopping, the non-restaurant storefront it launched in November 2023, and listed Ryman, The Entertainer, The Perfume Shop, HURR and Accessorize as existing partners.
Three weeks later, on September 9, Hotel Chocolat announced a gifting partnership with Deliveroo. The same day, Wolt’s newsroom said that its Luxembourg country head, Tomás Etcheverry, had taken on an additional role as general manager of Deliveroo Belgium, a small but telling example of DoorDash moving people across its European brands rather than running them as silos. Suzy McClintock, Deliveroo’s vice president of new verticals, said in the Robert Dyas announcement that the company’s home and kitchen category grew items sold by nearly 25% year over year, which is the kind of number that justifies chasing a bulk-goods anchor tenant.
None of these deals involve Costco, and that is the point. They show a UK platform actively signing large-format, non-grocery retailers with dozens of stores each, which is the exact merchant profile of a warehouse club. Meanwhile the UK’s incumbent grocers are pushing rapid delivery hard on the demand side: Tesco has made its Whoosh service free until January, a move we covered in detail in our note on the £25 rule and the one catch, and even Primark has finally accepted home delivery, as we reported when it confirmed a £90 million Sheffield fulfillment site. A UK shopper who can get Tesco in an hour and a Primark parcel next day is being trained to expect the same from a Costco run.
What the pattern suggests
Read together, the signals describe a retailer that has converted same-day delivery from an exception into a template, and two platforms that have converted Costco from a domestic account into a global one. The natural next step in any global account is coverage of the largest markets where the partner already operates. The table below maps Costco’s warehouse count against the partners each country already has, based on the companies’ own announcements as of September 19, 2026. An empty cell means we could not find an announced listing, not proof that none exists.
| Market | Costco warehouses | Uber Eats | DoorDash group | Instacart | Read-through |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States and Puerto Rico | 647 | Yes (47 states, Sept 16) | Yes (nationwide, Sept 17; Puerto Rico earlier) | Yes (since 2017) | Three partners; the template |
| Canada | 115 | Yes | Not announced | Yes | Likely next DoorDash add |
| Mexico | 43 | Yes | Not announced | No | Covered |
| Japan | 37 | Yes | Not announced (Wolt present) | No | Covered |
| United Kingdom | 29 | Not announced | Not announced (Deliveroo present) | No | Largest uncovered market |
| South Korea | 20 | No platform | No platform | No | Structurally hard |
| Australia | 15 | Not announced | Yes | No | Covered |
| Taiwan | 14 | Yes | Not announced | No | Covered |
| China | 7 | No platform | No platform | No | Local apps only |
| Spain | 5 | Yes | Not announced | Yes (Jan 2026) | Covered twice |
| France | 3 | Yes | Not announced (Deliveroo present) | Yes (Jan 2026) | Covered twice |
| Sweden | 2 | Not announced | Yes (via Wolt) | No | Covered |
| Iceland | 1 | No platform | Yes (via Wolt) | No | Covered |
| New Zealand | 1 | Not announced | Yes | No | Covered |
Two features of this matrix drive the prediction. The first is that every Costco market with more than ten warehouses now has at least one on-demand partner, except the UK and Korea. Korea is a structural exception: neither Uber Eats nor any DoorDash brand operates there, the market is dominated by Coupang Eats and Baemin, and Coupang is itself a direct retail competitor to Costco, which makes a listing commercially awkward. The UK has no such excuse: Uber Eats is one of the two largest food-delivery apps in the country, Deliveroo is the other, and both have functioning grocery and retail verticals.
The second feature is that Costco’s UK e-commerce is the weakest link in its own digital estate. Costco has run a grocery delivery service from costco.co.uk since 2020, but at a £5.99 fee and a five-to-seven-business-day window, per trade coverage at launch, which is a parcel service rather than a same-day one. The company lists the UK among the nine countries where it operates e-commerce sites, yet it has never announced a UK equivalent of the Instacart-powered sameday.costco.fr and sameday.costco.es sites it launched in January. Either Costco builds that itself or a marketplace fills the gap; the recent pattern says the marketplace moves first, because it can list every warehouse in weeks rather than quarters.
On timing, the March 31, 2027 horizon is deliberate. It covers the post-holiday window when both Uber and DoorDash historically announce merchant expansions ahead of their fourth-quarter results, it lands before DoorDash’s “single global technology platform” is fully live in the first half of 2027, and it precedes Costco’s fiscal second-quarter call in early March 2027, which would be the natural venue for management to talk about international same-day.
Prior precedents: how Costco’s same-day map has been drawn
Costco’s history of delivery launches is short but consistent: each partner has been added in one market first, proven, and then extended geographically, with the gap between launches shrinking. The table below lists the announced milestones we could verify.
| Date | Partner | Market | Scope | What it established |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Instacart | United States | Same-day from warehouses | Third-party fulfillment from a members-only box works |
| 2021 | Uber Eats | Texas (25 locations) | Pilot | Marketplace apps can verify membership at checkout |
| By 2026 | Uber Eats | Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, France, Spain | “Hundreds” of locations | Uber runs Costco in six non-US countries |
| By 2026 | DoorDash and Wolt | Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, Puerto Rico | Multiple countries | Acquired brands carry the Costco account |
| June 2025 | Instacart | United States | $10 monthly same-day credit for Executive members | Costco subsidizes delivery for its best members |
| January 30, 2026 | Instacart (Storefront Pro) | France and Spain | All locations, sameday.costco.fr and .es | First Costco-owned same-day sites outside North America |
| September 16, 2026 | Uber Eats | United States | 17 states to 47, nearly 600 warehouses | National scale plus cross-membership offers |
| September 17, 2026 | DoorDash | United States | All warehouses, 4,000+ products | Multi-partner per country is now Costco policy |
The cadence is the argument. Costco made two international same-day moves in 2026 before September (France and Spain) and two US moves in a single week in September. The pattern suggests the company has finished debating whether third-party delivery cannibalizes warehouse visits and has moved on to sequencing markets. The UK, with 29 warehouses concentrated around London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh, is the densest remaining opportunity in the estate.
Wider context: warehouse clubs, marketplaces and the fight over the member list
The Costco deals sit inside a broader repositioning of the delivery platforms. DoorDash’s second-quarter letter reported that DashPass members placed roughly 75% of total orders in its US grocery and retail categories, and Uber’s Costco release leans on Uber One in the same way. Both companies are using subscription members to underwrite low-margin grocery baskets, and both want anchor merchants whose customers already pay an annual fee, because those shoppers convert to platform subscriptions at higher rates. A Costco member is, almost by definition, a household that has already decided to pay for access.
That is also why Instacart has the most to lose. Instacart built its Costco relationship over nine years and extended it to Europe only in January; the September announcements put two rivals on the same warehouses in Instacart’s home market within a day of each other. Our June analysis of why Instacart was likely to be re-rated as grocery-tech infrastructure argued that its enterprise software (the Storefront Pro layer that powers Costco’s French and Spanish sites) would matter more than its marketplace. The UK question is a live test of that view: if Costco chooses to build a UK sameday site on Instacart’s software rather than list on Uber Eats or Deliveroo, the infrastructure thesis wins and our prediction fails.
The UK market itself is unusually receptive. Rapid grocery delivery has consolidated into the incumbents’ own services (Tesco Whoosh, Sainsbury’s Chop Chop) plus the two marketplaces, after the dark-store pure plays retreated. A warehouse club listing gives the marketplaces something the supermarkets cannot: bulk pack sizes, Kirkland Signature private label, and a basket that routinely tops £150. For Uber Eats or Deliveroo, that basket size does more for order economics than any number of £20 convenience runs.
Implications for retailers, platforms and investors
For UK grocers and big-box retailers, the signals point to a new competitor in the on-demand basket by spring. Costco’s price positioning on branded grocery, household paper and electronics is aggressive, and a same-day listing removes the one friction (the drive to an out-of-town warehouse) that currently limits how often members shop it. Retailers running their own rapid services should expect marketplace promotional activity around Costco’s launch window, and category managers in paper, pet food and bulk beverages should model share loss in postcodes within a 30-minute delivery radius of the 29 UK warehouses.
For platforms and their merchants, the more interesting implication is the emergence of a per-country checklist. Once a global retailer has proven a partner in one region, the marginal cost of the next country is mostly legal and commercial, not technical. Retailers with multi-country estates (IKEA, Decathlon, Zara, Primark) should assume that the platforms will approach them with the same “global partnership” framing, and that exclusivity in one market will be traded against speed of rollout in others. Robert Dyas’s UK deal with Deliveroo is described as exclusive; Costco’s US deals are pointedly not.
For investors, the near-term checkpoints are dated. Costco’s September 24 call is the first: any management comment on international same-day, or on the UK specifically, would advance the timeline.
Uber and DoorDash report third-quarter results in early November, and both tend to name new merchant countries in their letters. Instacart’s third-quarter call in the same window is the place to listen for Storefront Pro international wins, which would be the counter-signal. If none of those three events mention the UK, the probability of a listing by March 31 should be marked down, not held.
Caveats: what could go wrong
The strongest objection is that Costco may prefer to own the storefront. The January launches in France and Spain were Costco-branded sites powered by Instacart’s software, not marketplace listings, and Costco has historically been protective of its member data and its member pricing. A UK sameday.costco.co.uk built on Storefront Pro would satisfy the same-day demand without giving Uber or DoorDash the customer relationship. If that is the route, the prediction fails on form even if the substance (same-day Costco in the UK by spring) turns out right.
A second objection is UK-specific operating friction. Costco UK warehouses operate under a membership model that includes trade members, the estate is smaller and more dispersed than the US one, and UK gig-economy rules have tightened, with new employment-rights provisions taking effect from October 2026. Platform shoppers picking 40-kilogram bulk orders in a warehouse designed for trolleys is an operational problem that the US and Canada solved with dedicated in-store pickers; there is no public evidence Costco UK has staffed for that.
Third, the sequencing may run through Canada or Korea before the UK. Canada is Costco’s second-largest market by far, and DoorDash has no announced Costco presence there despite operating nationally; a Canadian DoorDash launch may be the group’s next move, consuming the commercial bandwidth that would otherwise go to Deliveroo UK. Uber, for its part, may see more value in deepening its six existing Costco countries than in opening a seventh.
Finally, macro and corporate noise could push the timeline. Costco is contesting a multidistrict tariff-refund action in the US, DoorDash is mid-integration on Deliveroo and Wolt with a technology platform not due until 2027, and any of the three companies could deprioritize a UK launch in a quarter where margins are under scrutiny. We hold the base case at roughly 55% for Uber Eats first, 25% for a Deliveroo-first launch, and 20% for no UK marketplace listing by March 31, 2027, with those weights being our own judgment rather than anything the companies have disclosed.
| Scenario | Our weight | What you would see first | By when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uber Eats UK lists Costco | ~55% | Uber newsroom or UK press release citing the six-country footprint becoming seven; Uber One cross-membership offer in sterling | By March 31, 2027 |
| Deliveroo (DoorDash) UK lists Costco first | ~25% | Deliveroo Shopping announcement; DoorDash third-quarter or fourth-quarter letter naming the UK in the Costco relationship | By March 31, 2027 |
| No UK marketplace listing; Costco builds an Instacart-powered UK sameday site or does nothing | ~20% | Instacart international Storefront Pro win, or silence through Costco’s early-March 2027 call | Prediction fails |
FAQ
Is Costco UK already on Uber Eats or Deliveroo?
Not as far as we can find. Uber’s September 16 release lists Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, France and Spain as its non-US Costco markets, and DoorDash’s September 17 release lists Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland and Puerto Rico. Neither names the UK, and Costco UK’s own delivery service is a five-to-seven-day parcel model rather than same-day.
Why Uber Eats rather than Deliveroo as the base case?
Uber has already deployed Costco in six countries outside the US, which means its membership verification, bulk-basket handling and warehouse picking processes are proven across multiple regulatory environments. Deliveroo has the UK retail momentum but no Costco account of its own yet; its parent’s Costco markets run through Wolt and DoorDash-branded apps. We think Uber’s shorter integration path outweighs Deliveroo’s local strength, though not by a wide margin.
Could Costco simply launch its own UK same-day site instead?
Yes, and that is the main way this prediction fails. In January Costco chose Costco-branded sites powered by Instacart’s Storefront Pro for France and Spain rather than marketplace listings. If Costco values control of the UK member relationship over speed, it may repeat that model, which would deliver same-day Costco in the UK without any Uber Eats or Deliveroo listing.
What about South Korea, Costco’s fourth-largest international market?
Korea is structurally harder. Neither Uber Eats nor any DoorDash brand operates there, the delivery market is led by Coupang Eats and Baemin, and Coupang is a direct retail competitor to Costco. A Korean listing would require Costco to partner with a rival, which the pattern elsewhere suggests it would rather avoid.
Does the US nationwide launch tell us anything about UK timing?
Indirectly. The US expansion took five years from Uber’s 2021 Texas pilot to 47 states, but the international launches have been far faster: six Uber countries and five DoorDash-group countries were live before the US went national. That suggests the international playbook is now templated, and templates get applied to the largest uncovered market first.
What would make you abandon the prediction early?
Three things: an Instacart announcement of a UK Storefront Pro site for Costco; Costco management stating on the September 24 or early-March calls that international same-day will remain a Costco-owned channel; or a DoorDash Canada Costco launch that is explicitly described as the next and final step in the partnership for now. Any one of those would cut the base-case probability roughly in half.
Would a UK listing cover all 29 warehouses at once?
Probably not on day one. The US pattern was a state-by-state ramp on Uber and an all-warehouse switch-on at DoorDash, while the France and Spain launches covered every location from the start because the estates are tiny. For 29 UK warehouses, a London-and-South-East pilot followed by a national rollout within a quarter is the likelier shape, so the prediction counts a partial launch as a hit provided it is a live, orderable Costco storefront on the app.
How does this affect Instacart?
The September deals put two rivals on Instacart’s most important warehouse-club account in its home market, and the UK is the next place that could happen. Instacart’s counter is its software: if Costco builds UK same-day on Storefront Pro, Instacart keeps the account without a marketplace. That makes the UK outcome a useful read on whether Instacart’s future is as a marketplace or as infrastructure.
Where can I verify the signals myself?
Uber’s September 16 release is on its investor relations site, DoorDash’s September 17 release is on its newsroom and investor site, Costco’s warehouse counts are in its September 2 August sales release on investor.costco.com, and Deliveroo’s Robert Dyas announcement is on Deliveroo’s UK newsroom. DoorDash’s second-quarter shareholder letter is filed as an exhibit to its August 8-K on the SEC’s EDGAR system.