Appetite for growth: Just Eat and insight

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The past year has been a great time to be a food-delivery company. People trapped at home, some with plenty of disposable income, have sent demand for food deliveries through the roof, with many trying such services for the first time. In the UK, there is no bigger company operating in this industry than Just Eat.

The brand is part of global business Just Eat Takeaway, founded in Denmark in 2001, which merged with British rival Takeaway.com in 2020. The company processes around 100 million food orders in the UK each year, and in the 20 years since it was founded, online food delivery has developed from a niche market to big business, with couriers and adverts widespread across most major UK cities.

While Just Eat is the market leader, it faces stiff competition. Big takeaway brands such as Pizza Hut and Domino’s Pizza are rivals. Deliveroo and Uber Eats are also growing in the UK and have significant backing.

There has also been controversy around the wider industry recently. An initial public offering (IPO) from Deliveroo fell short of initial targets after several investment firms steered clear because of concerns over its business model. Uber, meanwhile, was defeated in the Supreme Court by some of its drivers over their employment status, which could result in them being treated as employees rather than self-employed.

Raising profile

Just Eat is in the process of hiring its couriers and moving away from the so-called ‘gig’ economy.

“The big challenge for the business right now is around the category perception,” says Liam Laville, senior insight manager at Just Eat Takeaway. “The Deliveroo IPO has brought to the fore the question of whether the model is sustainable. Because we are market leader, we are tarnished with the brush, even though we have a different business model [hybrid marketplace and delivery], and we are trying to do the right thing by recruiting our couriers.”

With increased profile, controversial rivals and a competitive market, insight is crucial to keep Just Eat ahead of the game. Laville says that the company has a very flat structure, making it relatively easy to share insight with the senior team, via the chief marketing officer. “People at Just Eat understand and appreciate the value of insight and data,” he says. “We are a very data-led company, and they get it.”

Laville has been at the company for four and a half years, and sits within the global insight team, which is part of the marketing department. His team of nine covers all 23 markets in which Just Eat operates, and has members in Canada, Amsterdam and London. Plans are afoot to expand the team by 50% by the end of 2021.

The global insight team is one of three departments that cover Just Eat’s insight function. The data and behavioural insight team sits within finance, providing information and data on Just Eat’s performance, while a user experience department, focused on product testing, sits within the product team.

In global insights, there are four main functions – brand and consumer research, media analytics, voice of the customer, and a team focused on a ‘customer closeness’ programme, a qualitative project to understand the customer experience and target audience for Just Eat.

“We are on a real drive to bring the customer into the business,” says Laville. “Our core customers are not people who live in London, like us – they are people in Glasgow, Bradford or Hull. In the programme, we would go out to these customers, meet them in their homes and chat to them. We have now moved that online, but the beauty of online is that we can roll it out to every country.”

Getting the data

It has been a meteoric rise in the past few years, with the company highlighted by Kantar’s Brand Z list of the top 75 most valuable UK brands as the third-fastest growing major brand in the country, behind Ocado and Deliveroo. In 2020, Just Eat grew 19% in brand value, and was considered by Kantar to be worth an estimated £2.2bn.

This rapid rise is partly because of the pandemic, which drove restaurant and takeaway sales online and increased the need for food couriers. There has also been a catchy and ubiquitous advertising campaign in recent years, using the jingle ‘Did somebody say Just Eat?’. The ad was given a refresh last year and recruited rapper Snoop Dogg to rewrite the jingle, with the aim of attracting a younger, more urban demographic.

Just Eat retained its agreement with advertising agency McCann London earlier this year and launched a new campaign showcasing the range of major food partners it has attracted.

The brand and consumer research arm of the insights team, where Laville sits, focuses on the company’s brands globally. It also looks at campaign concept development work and restaurant partnerships, such as with McDonald’s, Greggs, Burger King and KFC. Just Eat has a sponsorship deal with European football governing body Uefa, covering tournaments including the Champions League, the Europa League and Euro 2020 (see overleaf).

The company is trying to use data to influence decision-making at all levels. “There are short-term decisions that can be made because we have data in real time,” says Laville. “We know how many people ordered chicken tikka masala in Huddersfield last night, for example – we have that level of detail. We can keep a live track on what is going on in the data, and we can react to that.”

Hall & Partners is Just Eat’s research agency of choice. It runs a brand tracker and knowledge-management platform, the Hub, which shares intelligence across the company in the form of short insight stories, highlighting people’s experience of the brand.

Data collected by the company is also fed into the Hub, including brand experience data, information from 23 Just Eat Takeaway markets, share of voice data, customer reactions, and comparisons with competitors. The data is gathered from multiple sources and audiences – from consumers to couriers, and employees to restaurant owners. The Hub is a public platform, so it cannot be used for commercially sensitive data, while the company’s data warehouse and econometrics team analyses commercially sensitive data alongside this.

Laville is particularly proud of the company’s ‘connected reviews’ work. This takes brand experience, commercial, restaurant partner insight, voice of the customer, and other data, and combines it in a single document to make it more easily understood by staff internally and encourage greater collaboration across the insight function.

The future

Last year, Just Eat Takeaway announced its intention to buy US food delivery firm Grubhub for $7.3bn, a deal that is expected to close later this year. The agreement would launch Just Eat in the US and create the world’s biggest food-delivery firm outside of China. A Forbes profile of the company earlier this year quoted its chief executive, Jitse Groen, as declaring the firm will go “all out” to win the London food-delivery market.
The company has, admittedly, been fortunate with Covid-19, which has boosted profits – in the first quarter of 2021, orders increased by 79%, to 200 million worldwide, with gross market value rising 89% to €4.5bn.

Laville thinks the pandemic has been a catalyst for the industry. “It is category-wide growth – it is not just us,” he states. “It is very busy in terms of demand, but Covid-19 has done years’ worth of learning in the space of months. It has brought a whole load of suppliers that would not have considered aggregators before, with lots of new restaurants on the platform. New supply means new riders and couriers.

“With increased demand, of course, comes issues with delivery times and customer care centres not responding as quickly as people would like. This has brought a whole host of challenges, and there have been times when the experience has not been up to our standards because we are having to cope with high demand. But we have just had to run with it, react and keep up the pace.”

The company is currently focusing on price leadership as it attempts to stay ahead of competitors Deliveroo and Uber Eats. This includes analysing the factors that influence whether people decide to order through the Just Eat platform – such as delivery fees and times – as well as more general issues, such as choice of restaurant.

In an industry as focused on the food and restaurants available on a delivery platform as the cost of delivering it, the issue is very complex.

“It is not as simple as lowering your prices, like you can do in the supermarkets, because there are so many facets to the industry,” Laville says. “We are a publicly listed company that needs to make money, and we need a sustainable approach to make sure we are best value for money.

“This isn’t just food delivery any more – you can get groceries delivered, coffee delivered, alcohol delivered. It is [about] finding restaurant partnerships that are sustainable and that make sense for our brand.”

This article was first published in the July issue of Impact.