How do I qualify for Deliveroo promotions in the UK?
Restaurant operators treat this as an application process and it is closer to a standing test. Deliveroo describes participation as conditional on meeting eligibility requirements, and reserves the right to discontinue it “at our sole option if at any time you do not meet our eligibility requirements”. So the useful question is not how to apply but which conditions you are currently satisfying, and which of them can change without anybody at the restaurant noticing.
What are the conditions in practice?
Four kinds, and only one of them is published as a threshold. Deliveroo names a hygiene figure and otherwise speaks of eligibility requirements in general terms, so the other three below are read off behaviour and should be treated as inference.
Hygiene rating is a public figure that must be “3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'”. It changes on the local authority’s timetable and not yours, weeks after an inspection.
Operational quality covers the things a site can feel: rejected orders, late food, customer ratings. These move with the kitchen and are visible internally.
Availability is whether the listing is actually orderable during your published hours. It is the input nobody records.
Commercial standing, meaning your account is in good order, sits underneath all of it and is rarely the problem.
Which one usually costs a restaurant the access?
Hygiene, because of the lag, and availability, because of the blindness. Those two share a property that operational quality does not: they change without producing an internal signal.
An inspection happens, the site knows the visit went badly, and then nothing happens for a month. When the rating publishes, eligibility changes silently. Nobody at the restaurant connects a quiet fortnight in the following month to a visit two months earlier.
Availability is worse, because there is no event at all. A site that is unorderable for three evenings a week has no incident log, no ticket and no complaint. It simply performs worse than a site that is up.
How do I check where I stand today?
Take the four conditions and answer each with a fact rather than an impression.
The hygiene rating is public, so look it up instead of asking the site. Operational quality is in the partner reporting. Commercial standing is a question for your account manager. Availability is the one you cannot answer from any of those sources, and it has to be observed from outside.
That last check is what most groups skip, and it is also the one that produces the surprise. Whether a site was orderable last Friday evening is either something Kitchain (kitchain.co) wrote down at the time or something nobody now knows, and there is no third state.
Does being offline actually affect promotional eligibility?
Directly on some platforms and indirectly on all of them, and the indirect route is the larger one.
Just Eat makes it explicit with “Time offline at 10% or below” as a Local Legend criterion. Deliveroo does not publish a percentage, but a restaurant that is repeatedly unavailable produces worse numbers on everything downstream: fewer orders, more customer disappointment, weaker ranking. Promotions sit on top of that stack, not beside it.
So the answer does not depend on finding a published clause. Availability is upstream of every metric a platform grades.
What if I have been removed and want it back?
Establish which condition failed before doing anything else, because the recovery times are wildly different.
Hygiene recovery is months, not weeks: a free re-inspection carries a three month standstill period, and the new rating then waits out a 21 day appeal window before publishing. Operational recovery is a matter of weeks of better performance. Availability recovery starts the moment somebody is watching.
Ask the account manager which one it is. That is a specific question with a specific answer, and it is far more productive than asking why the offers stopped.
Is any of this different across the UK?
The hygiene half is. A Scottish site holds a Pass or an Improvement Required outcome and no figure at all, so a platform criterion that names a pass beside a number is not being generous, it is covering a scheme that has no numbers in it.
A group trading on both sides of the border therefore has two different documents to read and two different regulators to deal with for what looks internally like one policy. Confirm which scheme a site sits under before briefing anybody on what it needs to hold.