This new feature from Postmates wants to gamify food delivery

San Francisco-based Postmates, an app-based company that delivers food and groceries, announced on Wednesday that it added a new feature to its service called Postmates Party.

It works like this: Users have five minutes to order from the same restaurants users nearby are tapping into by looking at the recently added “What’s Trending” section of its mobile app. If they join the “Postmates Party” and share a driver, users score free delivery.

“Postmates Party is a fun way to give customers the option to save money by ordering from popular restaurants that people all around them are ordering from in real time,” Bastian Lehmann, CEO and cofounder of Postmates said in the release announcing the update to the service.

Philly is one of only a dozen cities to get access to the new feature, which TechCrunch likens to Uber’s POOL service. After raising $100 million in equity funding at the end of last year, Postmates reaches nearly 3,000 cities nationally, or 70 percent of the U.S. population.

Amid the highly competitive food delivery market, Postmates boasts of having some 500,000 restaurants and retailers on its platform. It claims the No. 1 spot market share for Los Angeles and the Southwest.

But what about Philly? On Tuesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that grocery delivery service Instacart — which recently let 56 local staffers go — controlled just over one third of the grocery delivery market, according to a study from Earnest Research from September of last year. In the study, Postmates represents only 2 percent of that same sector, though its overall footprint is larger since it also delivers food from restaurants, alcohol and other drinks.

Postmates, which launched its service in Philly back in 2014, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on itst Philly presence.