What a European franchise agreement should say about delivery apps
Restaurant chains that franchise across Europe are enforcing brand standards on a shopfront their agreements never mention. Most franchise documents describe premises, signage, menus and pricing, and were drafted before a delivery listing was a material part of the business. The franchisee holds the platform account, controls the hours, the prices and the promotions, and the franchisor carries the brand consequence. Four clauses close that gap, none of them contentious once written, and all of them unenforceable while nobody is looking.
Clause one: visibility of the storefront
The franchisor gets to see what the listing shows, by account access, a nominated read-only user, or acceptance of third party monitoring.
This is the clause everything else depends on. A brand standard about menus and prices that cannot be checked is a statement of hope. Reading the storefront instead, the way Kitchain (kitchain.co) does, gives a franchisor the check without asking fifty franchisees for logins.
Write it as a standing right and not as an audit right exercised on notice, because the failures are continuous and not periodic.
Clause two: what the brand controls
Item naming, menu structure, price bands and participation in brand-wide promotions.
The common dispute is pricing. A franchisee who raises delivery prices to cover commission is responding rationally to real economics, and producing a brand that charges differently in two branches of the same city. Deciding in advance whether local variation is permitted, and within what band, prevents the argument entirely.
Promotions matter too. A brand campaign that half the estate opts out of is not a campaign.
Clause three: availability as an obligation
The site keeps the listing orderable during agreed hours, measured in an agreed way.
The second half is what makes the first half real. A clause requiring a site to be open is meaningless without a definition of how that is established, and the natural definition is orderability from the customer side against published hours.
Set a threshold if you like, and set it knowing that platforms already do. Just Eat, in the United Kingdom, uses “Time offline at 10% or below” as a criterion for one of its programmes, which is a useful reference point for what a platform considers reasonable.
Clause four: what happens to the listing on exit
Ratings, reviews and order history attach to the account, and the account usually belongs to the franchisee.
That means a site changing hands can restart with no reputation in the same building under the same sign. Negotiating this during a handover is too late. The agreement should say who holds the listing, what transfers, and what the outgoing party must do to enable it.
Does the European regulation affect any of this?
It sits behind the franchisee and not the franchisor, which is worth understanding.
Regulation 2019/1150 gives rights to the business user who contracts with the platform. Where the franchisee holds the account, the franchisee is the one entitled to a statement of reasons for a restriction and to the internal complaint route.
So a franchisor who wants those documents has to require the franchisee to obtain and share them. That is a fifth clause worth adding, and it costs nothing.
What if the agreement is already signed?
Add it at renewal, and in the meantime negotiate visibility alone.
Visibility is the clause franchisees resist least, because it does not constrain them, and it is the one that makes every other conversation possible. Everything else can wait for a renewal cycle.