UK third-party food delivery service Just Eat has made a round of layoffs in the UK and Ireland following the recent merging of its customer and restaurant operations teams. TechCrunch reports that while it’s unclear how many individuals are affected, it could be “as many as 100 staff overall.”
At the end of May, Just Eat united its separate customer and restaurant support divisions under a single operation, creating numerous redundancies in the process. This round of layoffs, according to TC, was announced internally on Friday and is meant to do away with those redundancies as part of a larger corporate reorganization.
A Just Eat spokesperson declined to comment to TechCrunch on the actual number but did confirm the reorganization, noting that, “At our full year results we talked about organising and energising the business to execute our strategy at pace.”
The news comes right after Just Eat, who is based in London but operates throughout the UK and in several other countries, acquired corporate catering marketplace City Pantry. Previously, Just Eat had acquired Flyt and Practi, both restaurant-tech-focused companies.
Meanwhile, Just Eat has also faced backlash from investors this year as the company’s pace of growth has slowed. In February, activist investor Cat Rock Capital Management LP, who owns a 2 percent share in Just Eat, urged the company to “merge with a rival online meal-delivery company,” in the wake of Just Eat’s inability to find a permanent CEO after Peter Plumb stepped down and was replaced by interim CEO Peter Duffy. While Just Eat has yet to find that permanent CEO, TechCrunch also reported that Graham Corfield, previously Just Eat’s UK Managing Director, has been appointed to the role chief operating officer.
And despite Just Eat’s recent acquisitions, which suggest growth into new areas, the company has been under some heavy pressure in 2019 not just from investors but competitors as well. Amazon’s recent (and somewhat controversial) investment in Deliveroo further intensifies that competition, particularly as Deliveroo tries to take over more and more of the food delivery stack by offering its restaurants everything from cheaper ingredients to wifi services.
Just Eat’s previous aforementioned acquisitions have been focused mainly on technology that powers the delivery process. Whether that’s enough to give the company a fighting chance against Deliveroo’s operation remains to be seen.
Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Graham Corfield had been appointed to the role of chief executive officer.
Wrong data there regarding interim CEO and COO, just google it and you’ll find right info, is not that difficult
Hi and thanks for letting us know! This post has been updated.