Why Major Brands Should Work with Just Eat

6th November 2015

Imagine a vast shopping centre with footfall ten times Westfield shopping centre, but where, instead of socks or stereos, every single person wants restaurant food. What would you do to secure a space? That is essentially what Just Eat has become over the last decade, transforming from a start-up into the world’s busiest digital high street for food delivery. At 59,000 outlets, was Just Eat a franchise it would rank ahead of Subway as the world’s largest.

We’ve done this by focusing on independents – in a few hours on a Saturday we send over 300,000 orders their way. But we are now open to working with major brands – and as Itsu, YO! Sushi and others have realised, there is an overwhelming case for brands to use Just Eat’s scale to accelerate top-line growth.

There are five big reasons to do this:

New customers: Just Eat gets over 700,000 visits a day to our apps and website in the UK alone (about ten times the footfall at Westfield London). It is essentially a busy digital high street, exclusively for restaurants. The vast majority of these visits occur at dinner time. In other words, people are not researching a future purchase – they are hungry and choosing what to eat right now. Only brands visible on the Just Eat digital high street are part of the consideration set for these consumers – and many of those that do feature find it their largest source of new customers.

Relevant demographics: Just Eat is now a mainstream consumer brand, used by one in ten adults in the UK. Contrary to the perception of some, they are not “downmarket” – over half of Just Eat users are A/B/C1s. People from social grade A (“high managerial or professional”) alone spend over £200m on Just Eat each year. 80% of target consumers see us as a mass-market consumer brand, and brand affinity is one of the main reasons people use the service. Because of this, our restaurants range from quick service to Michelin star. Whatever demographic a brand serves, a sizeable chunk will be using Just Eat.

Attractive margins: Seven out of ten customers who visit Just Eat don’t order through us. They use our site as a directory to browse menus and make their offline dining decision. Then they visit the restaurant in person, or call. We only charge our commission on orders directly placed through our products. That rate itself is far lower than other high footfall environments (many airports charge over 30%). And of course digital is an inherently high margin channel, with lower cost to serve and higher average order sizes than offline channels. All of that adds up to margin improvement as well as top line growth for brands on Just Eat.

Customer ownership: The delivery service determines how food is presented, whether it arrives hot or cold, how long customers have to wait, how they are spoken to, and who gets to brand the experience. So it is understandable that brands that are serious about growing delivery insist on controlling what happens to the food all the way to the customer (just as they wouldn’t dream of outsourcing front-of-house service). At Just Eat we embrace this – we love the diversity of our restaurant base, and have no desire to own the experience or impose our brand.

Flexibility: Our technology enables operators to control the days of the week and times of day when they feature on Just Eat – to avoid periods where kitchen capacity is constrained by eat-in customers, for example. Because we are big enough not to be dependent on any one brand, we’re comfortable with the idea that operators control when they drop on and off.

Aside from all the above, the defining feature of Just Eat at the moment is growth. Many of our 15 markets are expanding by over 100% year-on-year, some by over 200%. Customer growth is increasing far faster than the number of outlets – meaning the revenue each restaurant makes is constantly rising. So although the case for listing on Just Eat is strong today, it will only become more compelling over the years to come. As mentioned, daily UK footfall is the equivalent of ten Westfields today – but we plan to add many more.

Adrian Blair is chief operating officer at Just Eat. His email address is Adrian.blair@just-eat.co.uk