How much notice must a delivery app give before removing my restaurant?
Restaurant chains ask this after the fact, which is the wrong moment, because the answer is a deadline the platform was supposed to observe before anything happened. In the European Union the number is thirty days. Article 4(2) of Regulation 2019/1150 requires a platform terminating the whole of its service to a business user to provide “at least 30 days prior to the termination taking effect, with a statement of reasons for that decision on a durable medium”. Anything less has to fall inside a narrow set of exceptions.
Thirty days before what, exactly?
Before the termination takes effect, not before somebody mentions it. The clock runs to the day your restaurant stops being able to trade, and it starts when the statement of reasons is delivered.
That framing is worth holding onto, because platforms sometimes present a decision as already made and the thirty days as a courtesy window for you to wind down. Under the regulation the notice is a condition of the termination, not a gesture after it.
Does the same period apply if they only restrict me?
No, and the difference catches most operators out. A restriction or a suspension of part of the service carries no waiting period at all. What it carries instead is immediacy of explanation.
Article 4(1) requires the statement of reasons “prior to or at the time of the restriction or suspension taking effect”. So a platform can restrict you today, provided it tells you today and tells you why. It cannot remove you today.
In practice most of what a restaurant experiences is the first kind: dropped from a promotion, pushed down the listing, a delivery area narrowed, ordering suspended for a period. Those are owed an explanation on the spot rather than a month of warning.
When does the thirty days not apply?
Three exceptions, and they are narrower than a platform’s first reply usually suggests.
The notice period does not apply where the platform is under a legal or regulatory obligation that prevents it from waiting, where it exercises a right of termination under an imperative reason in national law, or where it can demonstrate repeated infringement of its terms by the business user.
The third is the one you are most likely to meet, and the word doing the work is “repeated”. A single alleged breach is not the exception. If a platform relies on it, the reasonable next question is which infringements, on which dates, and where they were notified to you at the time.
What if I only found out when the listing disappeared?
Then the sequence itself is the substance of the complaint, and it is a stronger position than arguing about the underlying decision.
Article 4(3) gives you the route: the opportunity to “clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11”. That process must be free and accessible, and it exists independently of whoever normally answers your emails.
Two things make that complaint work. The platform’s own dates, taken from the statement of reasons. And your dates, taken from your own record of when the listing actually stopped being orderable. Where those disagree, the disagreement is the case, and the second set has to have been collected before the argument started. That is the position Kitchain (kitchain.co) puts a group in.
If they change their mind, what am I owed?
Reinstatement “without undue delay”, together with restored access to the personal or other data generated before the measure took effect.
Ask for the data explicitly at the point the decision is reversed. Performance history, order records and rating history are the things quietly lost in a termination and reinstatement cycle, and nobody restores them unprompted.
What should a group do with a thirty day notice while it runs?
Treat it as a month of trading you still have, and as a month to move demand rather than to argue.
Removal from one platform is survivable if the other listings absorb the volume, and that redistribution takes time to build. Groups that spend the whole notice period on correspondence arrive at day thirty with the same decision and none of the mitigation.
Argue and prepare in parallel. They are not alternatives.