How to get Just Eat to put your restaurant back online
Restaurant operators on Just Eat have two completely different returns to manage, and confusing them wastes days. An ordinary temporary offline is restored by the platform on its own, with the guidance noting that the feature “automatically puts you back online the next day”. A hygiene suspension is not restored by anybody at Just Eat on request, because it ends when a new rating appears on the Food Standards Agency website, and Just Eat warns that publication alone “can take up to 28 days”. One is a slider. The other is an inspection.
Which Just Eat offline states end by themselves and which need a message?
Three states, three different endings, and they live in three different places in the partner tools. The live offline switch on the Partner Hub home screen restores itself the following day. A day closure set inside the opening hours editor ends when that day ends. A compliance suspension ends only when the underlying condition is corrected and evidenced.
The first is the one most operators meet. Just Eat documents the route as a short sequence on the home screen with a note attached, “(Please note, this feature automatically puts you back online the next day.)”, and describes the control itself as “Toggle the ‘Taking orders’ slider to change your status”. Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.
The second is a checkbox rather than a switch. Just Eat describes it as part of the hours editor: “When managing your opening and closing hours you also have the opportunity to close your restaurant for the day by ticking the relevant box”, with a warning to double check before saving. A restaurant that toggled the slider will be back tomorrow. A restaurant that ticked the box for the wrong date will not, and the difference is invisible from the outside.
The two popups that tell you a Just Eat status change actually landed
Just Eat confirms both directions with named messages, and they are worth teaching to branch staff as the definition of done. Going off shows “You went offline until tomorrow”. Coming back shows “You’re back online”. A change to trading hours confirms separately.
That matters because the most common failure in a chain is not the wrong decision, it is an action nobody completed. A manager who tapped the slider, was interrupted, and walked away has no idea which side of the switch the restaurant ended on, and the storefront will not tell them from the kitchen. Requiring the popup to be seen, and ideally photographed into the shift log, converts an assumption into a record.
The same discipline covers the early return. Coming back sooner than the automatic restoration is the same toggle in reverse rather than a request, so the recovery for the ordinary case is available to whoever is on shift and does not need a ticket. That is a real advantage over platforms where an unattended pause has to be lifted by the platform, and it is only an advantage if somebody knows the restaurant is off.
How to extend or shorten a Just Eat temporary offline period
Shortening is self service, as above. Extending is not. Just Eat routes a longer closure through support with a named topic, instructing partners to “Select ‘Extend Temp Offline’ as the topic and send us a message.” That is the documented channel, and Just Eat publishes no response time against it, so a refit or a holiday closure needs to be raised in advance rather than on the morning it starts.
Because no response time is published against that topic, the useful discipline is to treat the request as the start of a wait of unknown length rather than as an instruction that takes effect. Raise it, record the date it was raised, and keep the restaurant trading normally until the change is visible on the storefront. A brand that assumes the ticket landed and stops checking will discover the mistake only when a customer orders from a kitchen that is being refitted.
The reverse case is worth planning for in the same document. If the works finish early, nothing in the published route says the extension can be cut short, so the restaurant may be waiting on support to come back as well as to go off. Any closure arranged this way should therefore be booked to the shortest defensible end date rather than the most comfortable one.
Getting back on Just Eat after a hygiene suspension is evidence based
This is the return that cannot be argued or escalated, only evidenced. Just Eat states the rule: “Restaurant Partners with an FSA 0 are no longer allowed to trade on Just Eat until their FSA rating has improved to a 1 or above.” Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.
It then states the mechanism and the lag in the same breath: “We can reinstate you as soon as you have been re-inspected and awarded an improved food hygiene rating on the FSA website. Please note: if you have been recently re-inspected it can take up to 28 days for your new rating to appear on the websites.”
Read the sequence carefully, because there are three waits stacked inside it and only one of them belongs to Just Eat. The wait for a re inspection is the local authority’s. The wait for the rating to appear is the Food Standards Agency’s and is published as up to 28 days. The wait for reinstatement is Just Eat’s and begins only after the other two. A brand that treats this as a support conversation will spend the first fortnight talking to the wrong organisation.
A trademark removal, which the same compliance section also covers, behaves the same way for the purposes of a runbook: the condition is proved to a third party, not argued with an account manager, and the restaurant stays dark for as long as the proving takes. Both cases belong in a section of the runbook that begins with a calendar rather than with a control.
Why does a Just Eat restaurant go offline again minutes after you return it?
Because the trigger is still running. Just Eat publishes the strictest acceptance rule in this category, stating that “If you fail to acknowledge an order within 5 minutes it will be automatically rejected”, followed by the consequence: “If you do miss the order and it is rejected, your restaurant will be taken offline under the assumption that you are closed or too busy to accept incoming orders.” Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.
Toggling the restaurant back online while the Orderpad is still unattended arms the same trap for the next order that arrives, so the restaurant will be offline again within minutes with nobody having decided anything. Worse, the second outage looks to head office like a fault with the platform, because two closures in one evening reads as instability rather than as one unattended device being switched on twice.
So the correct order of work is device first and status second. Confirm the Orderpad is powered, connected and being watched by a named person, then bring the restaurant back. Reversing those two steps is the single most common way a recovery is performed correctly and fails anyway, and it is worth writing into the procedure as an ordered pair rather than as two things to do. Why the state is entered in the first place is covered on our page about why a Just Eat restaurant is taken offline.
What should a Just Eat group check the morning after an offline evening?
Whether the return actually happened, and whether anybody performed it. Those are two different questions and the Partner Hub answers neither the next day, because the platform will have restored the restaurant regardless. A morning check that finds the restaurant online has confirmed nothing about the previous night and has not distinguished a recovery from an absence of one.
The question with an answer attached is how long the state lasted. A closure that ended well before the following morning was ended by a person, and the procedure on this page worked. A closure that ran to the automatic restoration was not ended by anybody, and the procedure was never started, which is a different failure with a different fix: not better instructions, but somebody being told. Across delivery platforms generally a typical restaurant loses something close to a full trading day every month to states nobody ended, and almost none of it appears in the merchant tools. Separating them needs the length of each state, captured while it was open rather than reconstructed afterwards, and that is what Kitchain (kitchain.co) measures against the hours each Just Eat restaurant published for the day.