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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Just Eat Takeaway.com

Deliveroo Raises $180M, Nabs $7B Valuation

Deliveroo announced this week it has raised over $180 million in Series H funding from existing investors. The round was led by Durable Capital Partners LP and Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. With it, Deliveroo is now valued at over $7 billion, according to an official company statement. 

The new funds come ahead of Deliveroo’s initial public offering, which is expected to happen in the next few months.

The London, U.K.-based company said it would use the new funds to “further drive growth and enhancements to its services for restaurants, riders and consumers.” Examples of those areas include expanding Editions, Deliveroo’s delivery-only kitchen sites, expanding its grocery delivery service, and expanding its Plus subscription service. The company also said it would offer more restaurants its Signature service, which lets customers order via a restaurant’s own website.

It’s a shift from several months ago, when Deliveroo had to cut 15 percent of its staff in response to the pandemic. Also around that time, U.K. regulatory watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority approved Amazon’s highly scrutinized investment into Deliveroo, saying the delivery business could collapse without the funds. 

But, like other third-party delivery services around the world, Deliveroo has wound up faring very well so far throughout the pandemic. Will Shu, Deliveroo’s founder, told The Guardian in December that COVID-19 had “accelerated consumer adoption of food delivery services by about two or three years,” and that order volumes for the service in the U.K. and Ireland were double those of 2019. In the same interview, Shu also said his company had been profitable “at the operating level” for about six months.  

Currently, Deliveroo operates in 12 countries, including a number of Western European nations as well as Singapore, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. Its main competitor, Just Eat Takeaway.com, operates in many of the same markets.

Just Eat Takeaway.com to Stop Using Gig Workers in Europe

Just Eat Takeaway.com just made its sentiments known about how to classify gig workers — but not in the way you’d expect from a third-party delivery service. Company boss Jitse Groen told BBC this week that Just Eat Takeaway.com will “end” gig working in its operations in Europe.

“We’re a large multinational company with quite a lot of money and we want to insure our people,” he said. “We want to be certain they do have benefits, that we do pay taxes on those workers.” 

“Large multinational company” aptly describes Just Eat Takeaway.com these days. The company itself is the product of Netherlands-based Takeaway.com’s recent acquisition of the U.K.’s Just Eat. And in June, the newly formed company announced it would acquire Grubhub, creating the largest food delivery service in the world outside of China.

All that M&A means more hiring. But this hasn’t been a particularly easy time for gig workers, in Europe or elsewhere. With the pandemic keeping more folks at home, delivery orders are up. That demand renders the folks driving or biking the food to customers frontline workers at higher risk of exposure to the coronavirus. Under the status of gig worker, these individuals do not have access to certain workplace protections (e.g., paid sick leave) they would as employees.

Just Eat Takeaway.com’s changes to worker classification may only apply to Europe right now, but the company has operations all over the globe. The aforementioned Grubhub deal will soon give the company a presence in the U.S., too, where the debate over gig workers is especially heated right now. Just this week, a California judge ordered Uber and Lyft to reclassify its contract workers as employee. For Uber, that would mean changing the underlying model around its Eats business, too.

Groen did not say when the change for its his company’s European workers would take place. And how Just Eat Takeaway.com handles U.S.-based workers once the Grubhub deal kicks in remains to be seen. 

While Just Eat Takeaway.com looks to remove many of the downsides of gig worker jobs, others are spending millions to fight any changes to the system. At some point a new standard around benefits for these workers might emerge from the fight. Let’s hope it’s one that values human health and well-being over food delivery’s ever-elusive path to profitability.  

Uber to Acquire Postmates for $2.65B

Uber has agreed to acquire Postmates in a roughly $2.65 billion all-stock transaction, according to a press release from Uber. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021.

Uber first made the offer to buy Postmates at the very end of June, after a failed attempt to snap up Grubhub. According to sources close to the matter that spoke to Bloomberg, the two companies have actually been in talks on and off for about four years. 

The boards of both Uber and Postmates have approved the transaction, which is still subject to the approval of Postmates shareholders and also any regulatory approvals. Uber said in the press release today that it will keep the consumer-facing side of the Postmates app running separately from its Eats app, “supported by a more efficient, combined merchant and delivery network.” 

Acquiring Postmates would give Uber a larger presence in certain key markets, like Los Angeles, where Postmates is the leading third-party delivery app. In the past, Uber has said it will pull out of markets where it is not the number one or number two player.

Today’s deal is another piece of evidence that third-party delivery is consolidating fast. Grubhub itself was acquired by the newly formed Just Eat Takeaway.com in June. Elsewhere, Delivery Hero recently bought South Korean service Woowa Bros. for $4 billion and Brazil-based iFood announced a merger with Colombian delivery heavyweight Domicillios.com.

Notably, DoorDash, which is still the U.S. leader in terms of marketshare for third-party delivery, has not come up in this M&A flurry. At last check, the company secured an additional $400 million in funding. It filed to go public in February and still plans on a listing for 2020.

Uber Just Made an Offer to Buy Postmates

Just weeks after it lost the chance to acquire Grubhub, Uber has made an offer to buy Postmates, according to the New York Times. 

Three sources “familiar with the matter” and speaking anonymously told the NYT that Uber could potentially buy its third-party delivery rival Postmates for $2.6 billion and that the deal was in talks right now — though it could also fall apart.

It wouldn’t be the first time a deal fell through for Uber. Only weeks ago, the company looked to be buying Grubhub to bolster its Eats business. Those plans went awry after Dutch food delivery service Just Eat Takeaway.com swooped in and made its own deal with Grubhub for $7.3 billion. 

Antitrust concerns were one of the main issues with an Uber-Grubhub deal. Had the two companies combined, the new entity would have created a delivery service with as much marketshare as DoorDash currently holds (45 percent of the U.S. market) and rendered the on-demand food delivery arena much less competitive.

A Postmates deal would raise fewer regulatory flags, since the Bay Area-based service, last valued at $2.4 billion, is a much smaller player than Grubhub.

Even so, consolidation is in full swing in the food delivery world. Besides Just Eat Takeaway.com’s deal with Grubhub, Delivery Hero recently bought South Korean service Woowa Bros. for $4 billion and Brazil-based iFood announced a merger with Colombian delivery heavyweight Domicillios.com.

Uber has said Eats will only operate in markets where it is the number one or number two player. In the U.S., that feat that would have been easy to accomplish with a Grubhub acquisition. Were a Postmates deal to go through, it’s less certain how dominant Uber Eats would be across the country, since Postmates holds considerably less market share than the other major players.