Does the Platform to Business regulation apply to food delivery?
Restaurant chains assume this regulation is about app stores and online marketplaces for goods, and it is written more broadly than that. Regulation 2019/1150 applies to online intermediation services provided to business users “that have their place of establishment or residence in the Union and that, through those online intermediation services or online search engines, offer goods or services to consumers located in the Union”. A delivery marketplace that lists your restaurant and lets customers order from it is intermediating between you and a consumer, which is the activity the regulation describes.
What decides whether it covers my restaurant?
Where your business is established, and where your customers are, rather than where the platform is.
The article says the regulation applies “irrespective of the place of establishment or residence of the providers of those services”. So a platform headquartered outside the European Union that serves restaurants established inside it does not escape by virtue of its own address.
That is the practical test for an operator: is the restaurant established in the Union and selling to consumers in the Union.
Does the platform’s own view matter?
Only as a starting point, and several of them have already accepted the position in writing.
Foody’s partner terms describe an internal complaint system operated under European Regulation 2019/1150, including a commitment to publish annual data on how it performs. Wolt, Glovo and Bolt Food have all published ranking material of the kind Article 5 requires.
Those publications are the strongest available evidence that the platforms themselves treat the regulation as applying to this activity. It is a much better argument than reasoning from the text alone.
What does it give a restaurant in practice?
Four things, and they are procedural rather than financial.
An explanation before or at the time a restriction or suspension takes effect, on a durable medium. Thirty days notice before the service is ended altogether. A published description of the main ranking parameters. And a free internal complaint route with named mediators behind it.
None of that is compensation. All of it is the ability to find out what happened and to argue about it in a defined way, which is more than a restaurant has in most other markets.
What does it not cover?
Everything about what an interruption costs you.
The regulation does not require a platform to bear the cost of a closure it applied, does not require it to publish your availability history, and does not set service levels. So the commercial argument is still a commercial argument, and the evidence for it is still yours to produce.
Nothing in the regulation obliges a platform to hand you an availability history, so that half stays yours to keep. Kitchain (kitchain.co) builds it per listing, and every one of these conversations turns on it.
What about the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway?
We have not verified the position for any of them and we do not state one.
The safe formulation for an operator is that the regulation is written by reference to establishment in the Union, and that businesses outside it should check their own position rather than assume the protection travels with the brand. A group operating across Europe and the United Kingdom should expect to be treated differently in each.
How should this change what I do?
Read your terms once against the requirements, and classify events properly when they happen.
The second half is the one that pays. Restaurants routinely experience a lost promotion, a narrowed zone or a demotion as bad luck. Classifying them as restrictions, and asking for the reasons the regulation requires, is what turns a year of unexplained events into a documented pattern.