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Takeaways have taken place all over the world, in many different forms, by killing what previously was considered to be normal, an healthy life. People prefer to buy already prepared and cooked meals, instead of learning the art of cooking and eating a good meal. We live in a society that moves faster than us and it’s sometimes difficult to cope with everything we do. When we come back at 7pm or even 8pm, we are tired and the only thing we want to do is “Just Eat”.
That’s probably why Just Eat said “hello” to the LSE with the biggest tech IPO in UK after 8 years. The IPO valued the company at £1.47 billion ($2.44 billion), by making it probably the first billion dollar company in the Uk of the last years. London has been looking for a billion dollar valuation and it finally got one yesterday, even though the company doesn’t provide a technology, but more a platform to run a business.
Just Eat is a simple online takeaway food delivery service. What the founders did was to unify every single takeaway on one platform. The costumer is able to find the closest takeaways to a determined location, which could be your house, and order something. The company is already operating in 13 countries, with 100,000 meals a day and 36,000 restaurants.
Just Eat had a turnaround of £96.8m in revenues in 2013, which was up to 60% from the previous year. The numbers are growing and for them, it’s just a matter of partnering with more restaurants, because the platform is there. The challenge is to convince more business owners to be on the website, rather than improving the system.
The markets, where this company is successful, are those that don’t have “food” in their culture. It’s easy to see that a company like Just Eat would have never been successful in a country such as Italy, where people love cooking and eating. In this country, every excuse is for eating and ordering fast food online is not the best. By looking at their portfolio of restaurants in Rome, there is nothing apart from Chinese and Japanese restaurants, with a couple of pizza delivery services.
However in UK, where takeaway has grown so much in the past years, the service is disruptive. They have more than 13,000 restaurants only in this country. However, if we search the “restaurants” that have closed a partnership in Manchester, we can easily spot a “low level” quality of food. The only thing that this service can offer in a city such as Manchester is fast or Chinese food; if you want to look for healthy and italian food, you’ll never find it. Although the company lists several restaurants that say they cook italian, in reality is just a poor attempt to sell more food.
What we wonder is if this model can be extended to the “concept of italian restaurant”, which is a place where people sit and talk. It’s more a social glue between a group of people, rather than a takeaway. That’s why we haven’t seen a single one that is delivering pasta; but even though we haven’t seen them, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for it.
People like eating italian and it would be interesting to see how this kind of food can fit in the takeaway model. Why are we wondering it? This model is disruptive and it can really be helpful in some days, but the compromise we have to do is to eat fast food, which is not healthy for our body. What if we find a takeaway online service that supports only healthy food? It might be nice to order online a proper lasagne or pasta, cooked from an italian chef.
The world is loosing interest in healthy and well cooked meals and that’s probably the reason why we see a billion dollar valuation after more than thirteen years as a private company; but there is still a chance to see the same exact model applied for an healthy lifestyle, otherwise we’ll end up facing obesity.
