Ireland: delivery apps, hygiene display and your listing
Restaurant chains operating on both sides of the Irish Sea carry assumptions across that do not survive the crossing. The United Kingdom runs the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, and two UK platforms use its numbers as thresholds for listing and for promotional access. Ireland has its own food safety regime and is not part of that scheme, so a group cannot assume that the same rating logic, the same thresholds or the same display behaviour applies to an Irish listing. What does apply, and applies fully, is the European regulation that governs the platform relationship.
What carries across and what does not?
The platform mechanics carry. The hygiene thresholds do not.
Deliveroo’s UK hygiene policy is written against the Food Standards Agency and its numbers. Just Eat’s UK partner guidance sets a minimum against the same scheme. Those documents are UK documents, and reasoning from them about an Irish site is a mistake worth avoiding explicitly.
What does carry is everything about availability, closure states, notice and complaints, because those follow from the platform’s design and from European law rather than from a national food safety scheme.
What does the European regulation give an Irish restaurant?
The same four things it gives every business user established in the Union.
A statement of reasons for a restriction or suspension “prior to or at the time” it takes effect, on a durable medium. Thirty days notice with reasons before service is terminated altogether. Ranking parameters set out in the terms. And an internal complaint system that is “easily accessible and free of charge for business users”.
An Irish site is established in the Union and those obligations follow from that. We have not verified the position for the United Kingdom, so a group should not carry an Irish answer across the sea, or a British one back.
Should a group run one policy across both islands?
One measurement standard, two compliance tracks.
The measurement is identical: whether each listing was orderable during published hours, whether prices match, whether promotions are visible. That question does not change with jurisdiction and it is the basis on which sites should be compared.
The compliance tracks differ, and treating them as one produces the classic error of an Irish site being assessed against a UK rating threshold that has no application to it.
What about the platform mix?
Similar to the United Kingdom in composition, and that similarity is what causes the assumption problem.
Because the same brands operate, head office reasoning tends to treat Ireland as a region instead of a separate market. The listings behave the same way and the surrounding rules do not, which is exactly the combination that produces confident wrong answers.
What should be checked on an Irish listing that would not be checked on a UK one?
What the listing actually shows about food safety, rather than assuming a rating is there or is absent.
That is a look at the storefront, not a policy question, and it is the sort of thing nobody has time to do for every site. What an Irish listing actually displays gets recorded by Kitchain (kitchain.co) instead of being inferred from what a British one does.
What is the practical instruction for a cross-border group?
Write down, per market, which thresholds apply and to which platform. One page.
The page exists to stop somebody in head office applying a UK number to an Irish site, or worrying about a UK threshold that does not bind there. It takes an afternoon and it prevents a whole category of confident error.