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WHILE IT’S PROBABLY best associated with a greasy pizza or sneaky Chinese takeaway, Just Eat is looking for the diet-conscious to drive its next phase of growth in Ireland.
The online ordering giant, which claims six out of every 10 takeaways is now signed up for its platform, plans to cash in on developing food fads like paleo and gluten-free meals.
“Healthy is one of the big, big trends and under that umbrella comes lots of different headings. Consumers are asking and we’re having to deliver,” Just Eat Ireland managing director Amanda Roche Kelly told Fora.
The company now employs around 40 people at its new offices in south Dublin and is the undisputed leader in the online ordering trade, although that comes with its own problems.
A report on the Irish takeaway sector commissioned by Just Eat and produced by DKM Economic Consultants put the total outlets in the country at nearly 3,000. With close to 1,800 already signed up to Just Eat, that leaves the company with relatively little headroom for finding new business.
“We’re going to be looking at other sectors within the takeaway area,” Roche Kelly said.
“Those other thousand restaurants aren’t necessarily your normal evening offerings – we’re looking at lunchtime, we’re looking at daytime and during the weekend.
“So there’s lots of stuff we can get into now and until you actually go there who knows what will happen.”
The report, which defined takeaways as anywhere that either offered food for home delivery or on-site pickup to eat away from the premises, put the total annual spend on takeaway food in Ireland at €1.48 billion.
That’s a lot of sandwiches and stir fries, but in the more-distant future Just Eat could be thinking larger again.
“The restaurant industry as a whole is much bigger than that,” Roche Kelly said.
“We’ve seen lots of other players in the market do lots of different things. We’re very happy at the moment just to try and get that other thousand restaurant partners on.”
The competition
When it comes to other players, the main company the Just Eat Ireland boss probably has in mind is Deliveroo – although Roche Kelly is quick to add that the two companies, despite their similar UK parentage, are very different prospects.
Just Eat’s local operation employs no drivers, instead relying on businesses’ own delivery or over-the-counter services.
Deliveroo, on the other hand, has its own team of bike riders and drivers to pick up food from restaurants that otherwise didn’t offer delivery. The company claims it has been growing orders 25% on average per month since launching in Ireland last April.
However Roche Kelly said her operation has no immediate plans to go head-to-head with Deliveroo in Ireland, despite some of Just Eat’s operations in other countries providing a similar service.
“At the moment, the biggest thing for us to drive orders to our current partners; (deliveries are) not really what we’re looking at for the moment, but it’s there if we want to get into it,” she said.
Roche Kelly added that Just Eat’s Irish orders had increased “slightly over” the 57% growth figure its parent company quoted for all territories last year, although she expects the rate of rises to slow in coming years.
The business also recently hiked its commission slightly, to 13%, ahead of a marketing push.
The most-recent accounts filed for the company’s local arm show it made a profit of more than €600,000 in 2014, although that wasn’t quite enough to rub out the accumulated losses incurred in previous years.
Among its regular offerings, it has recently been toying with options like delivering people fresh food or weekly ‘menus’, a seven-day quota of meals to be consumed as desired.
“Nothing is beyond Just Eat at this stage,” Roche Kelly said.
Written by Peter Bodkin and originally published on Fora, a new business publication for Irish startups and SMEs.
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What??? You mean 131 didn’t work… Noooooooo!!!
Everyone is waiting for 132s
So less buy the 131′s and more buy the 132′s meaning that, overall, the same amount of cars are bought this year.
Feckin brainless spanners, the gombeens that came up with this. Didnt we all say this would happen.
*sigh*
here is an idea. Scrap VRT car sales go up.
Exactly
Which would reduce our tax base and increase the money we spend on imported goods. If you want to support an industry there are better ones to choose.
Great for people working in car factories …. Which we don’t have … I’d rather see an incentive to maintain old cars ( using labour in Ireland), than send money out buying new cars …
Daft to encourage purchase of new cars and send €6,000,000,000 out of the Irish economy every year.
Dafter to use borrowed money to do it and give the banks 9% interest in the process.
NCT was supposed to prolong the national fleet and prevent wasting money in unnecessary early replacement. Car life longevity is what “smart economies” do: USA 10 yrs avg: Sweden 10.7 yrs avg: Germany 8 yrs avg.
Do the Irish not get it?
€6 bn would create a lot of jobs if spent in the Irish economy instead of “exported”!
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http://www.CarTaxPetition.net
So, fewer people can afford new cars? Well holy jaysus. That’s a surprise!
Just a few things on car sales, As with the UK you should be able to buy a reg for your car making a 99D into a 01C and so on, Motor tax should be scraped and put on fuel with rebates to business users and taxi, haulage etc.. NCT on cars over ten years old should be from the day of the test and not this stupid system of the date of first registration making Jan- April the busiest in the test centres.
Is the VRT not illegal in accordance with EU regulations? So we cannot blame the EU for that one.
Seemingly the mobility allowance was illegal too, they were able to scrap that..
It should be noted that we don’t make cars here. Our attempts to prop up and assist the motor trade in this country is madness. We should be actively discouraging the purchase of new cars as cars are one of Germany’s biggest exports. It is one of the best ways for us PIIGS to strike back at the Germans and encourage them to give us the debt forgiveness we so desperately want.
Do u still have that passat Ciaran….
Oh my god!…and that’s coming from an agnostic. I always refrain from this question but here it goes….Are you fckin stupid?! Kill Irish jobs put of spite is your suggestion?
I do. Second hand mind so the Germans got that money off some other gorp. I did put ‘new cars’ in the comment mind. Wouldn’t have to be long term, just long enough to have the desired effect.
Who is an agnostic and what’s that got to do with the price of bread?
Yes unfortunate side effect but I think most would agree that we are sending enough money towards the German economy…
Once you go black you never go back
black the most popular colour, reflects the mood of a nation..
Goes well with everything?
And it’s slimming ;)
also don’t have to wash it as often..
why no green cars in the emerald isle? is it because they are unlucky?
Most popular colour suits well to the situation on the market…
The property tax and water charges may possibly add to that also. We should be cutting our spending instead of new taxes. This would eliminate the need to “broaden the tax base” as Noonan regularly cites.
Why would I buy a new car? It’s got 4 wheels and drives just like every other car over the last 30 years! It will cost me several g’s, most of it tax and the tax man then rips me a new one every time i fill so I can drive to work to pay his tax bill.
State backed scrappage scheme ?…. anyone? ……. modified first time home buyers grant? …. anyone? ….. guess not. …. government have a short memory. … and very limited imagination or understanding of demand side economics
It is great to see an ignorant idea fall flat on its face.
I think it’s heavily linked to how much people have to spend rather than an extra digit on the number plate. The masses have spoken when it comes to buying new cars, we can’t afford them. Also with engineering and manufacturing so good these days a car will run for years and years without needing to be changed, people know that, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The whole problem was the fascination of the numbers on the reg plate which lead people to think they needed a knew car when in fact they didn’t; wanted yes, needed, no! We are in a time of needs not wants
Volkswagen at No 1 possibly as much to do with VW have its own finance vehicle with attractive interest rates as well as a good product range … As long as banks don’t lend or lend at near credit card rates , then car sales will remain in free fall and VRT receipts reducing in line ….
Personalized number plates would have been a good idea a money spinner and at least those that could afford it would have got some joy from it . . A sort of fun tax for a Change .
good news!
We need to see a whole year’s sales data to determine if the trend in sales of new cars is up or down. The new registration system was brought in to do away with the January spike and spread sales out over the whole year (not because it’s 2013 and superstitious wouldn’t like 13 on their reg plates, as several people have suggested.) Many people will hold off till the 132 reg comes out in July. Sales are down in January and February this year compared to last, but that shortfall should be recouped in the latter part of the year.
Car industry in UK kept 13 plates,the first of which were sold today and they are selling multiples of numbers being sold here without any fuss over superstition etc.
131 and 132 reg plates have nothing to do with superstition. Next year we’ll have 141 and 142 plates, and the year after we’ll have 151 and 152 plates. There are very good reasons for it, just as the UK has a split-year registration system too. When we had one year on the reg plate, sales (and new vehicle registrations) were concentrated in the early part of the year. There is a knock-on effect of this in that most NCTs fall due earlier in the year, leading to a backlog in testing dates.
It just so happened that the new regime started in 2013, and we all assumed that it was a superstitious aversion to the number 13. It’s not. It makes sense to do this.
So they are not attaching the new number plates securely enough ???. They will take some time to catch on, an more and more of them can be seen on the road … Ummm?
You can have any colour you want, as long as it’s black
I love red in a car, my last car was a green scoda octava kept breaking down, maybe it was the colour drives a corolla now cant compare.
have your say