Some of your branches are offline on Just Eat and the rest are fine
Restaurant chains on Just Eat lose branches individually because every rule on the platform is applied to a restaurant rather than to a brand. One order left unanswered on one Orderpad takes that restaurant offline. One premises with a food hygiene rating of zero is barred from trading while every other branch continues. One restaurant qualifies for the Local Legend programme and its neighbour does not. None of those events reaches head office on its own, and the offline state restores itself overnight, so the evidence is usually gone before anybody asks.
Why is the Just Eat five minute rule decided by one device in one branch?
Because the clock runs on the Orderpad in that branch and nowhere else. Just Eat states the rule in two halves: “If you fail to acknowledge an order within 5 minutes it will be automatically rejected”, and then “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.
The outcome therefore depends entirely on whether one person in one kitchen was near one screen for five minutes, and across an estate that produces a ranking rather than a scatter. Branches with the device by the pass rarely trip it. Branches where it is carried to a bench, or shares a socket, or is answered by whoever is free, trip it repeatedly, and they trip it at the same points of the same evenings because that is when the pass is busiest.
That is the useful thing about a per branch trigger with no tolerance in it. It measures one physical arrangement very accurately. Two restaurants with identical menus, identical volumes and identical staff numbers will separate cleanly on this platform if one of them keeps the Orderpad within arm’s reach and the other does not, and the separation will be stable enough to plan around rather than noise.
A Just Eat branch can be barred from trading by its own hygiene rating.
This is the clearest case of one branch being treated entirely on its own record. Just Eat states that “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.
The route back is not a support conversation and cannot be shortened by the brand. Just Eat describes it as reinstatement after a re inspection and warns about the publication lag: “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.”
For a group that produces an outage of a completely different order from anything operational. A branch in this state is dark for an inspection cycle plus the publication lag behind it, while its neighbours trade normally under the same brand name and the same marketing spend keeps pointing customers at all of them. The gap is not weeks of lost orders at one site, it is weeks of paid demand arriving at a site that cannot serve it.
Why do two branches disagree about collection and delivery on Just Eat?
Because the two sets of hours are independent, and Just Eat says so directly: “If you update your collection hours, this will NOT also update your delivery hours.” Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.
A brand rolling out a trading change therefore has two edits to make per restaurant, not one. Any branch where only one of the two was completed is present for one fulfilment type and absent for the other, and the customer complaint that follows will describe the restaurant as closed even though it is selling.
That is worth checking first on any branch that appears intermittently dark, because it produces a pattern that looks like an outage and is not. The listing is orderable for collection and not for delivery, or the reverse, at the same moment, every day, until somebody edits the second set of hours.
Closing for a day is a third control again, described by Just Eat as a checkbox inside the opening hours editor, with a warning to double check before saving. A day closure entered against the wrong restaurant in a long list is one of the quietest ways to remove a single branch from an estate.
Which of your Just Eat restaurants is a Local Legend, and which is not?
The programme is per restaurant, entry is by invitation and the criteria include availability, so it actively widens the gap between branches. Just Eat lists the thresholds as an “Average of 90+ orders per week”, a “Customer food review rating of 3+ stars”, an “FSA rating of 3+ or a ‘Pass'”, and “Time offline at 10% or below”, all held for two consecutive quarters. Source: partnerinfo.just-eat.co.uk.
Entry is not something a brand can apply for on behalf of its estate. The programme terms state that “Restaurants may only participate in the Programme if they have been invited to do so by Just Eat. If a restaurant receives an invitation, the restaurant will be automatically added to the Programme, unless the restaurant opts out”, with reviews every quarter and new invitations in January, April, July and October. Loss is automatic on the same terms.
Now read that against the section above. The branch that trips the five minute rule most often accumulates time offline, which is one of the four criteria, which costs it the badge and the visibility that comes with it, which costs it orders, which makes the ninety orders per week criterion harder. An estate does not simply differ on Just Eat, it separates, and the separation is self reinforcing.
What does the overnight restore hide from a Just Eat area manager?
The whole event. Going offline through the Partner Hub toggle carries an automatic return, which Just Eat notes in brackets in its own instructions, that the feature automatically puts the restaurant back online the next day, with the confirmation popup reading “You went offline until tomorrow” and the return reading “You’re back online”.
By the time anybody reviews the estate the following morning, every restaurant is online and the account looks correct. The branch that lost a Friday evening has no artefact, no closed period to inspect and no reason code to read, and the missing revenue gets attributed to weather or a quiet week. That is the specific reason a Just Eat estate can be uneven for months without anybody being able to say which branches are the problem.
A planned absence and an accidental one therefore leave completely different traces across an estate. The planned one was arranged with Just Eat in advance and someone at head office knows the dates. The accidental one was arranged by nobody, corrected by the platform, and is indistinguishable at review time from a branch that simply had a slow night. An estate accumulates the second kind and reports only the first.
How should a group compare two Just Eat restaurants against each other?
By comparing intervals rather than states, and by keeping the comparison at restaurant level, because that is the level the platform judges. For each branch, record when the listing was actually orderable, separately for delivery and for collection, against the hours that branch published for that day. Then look for shape rather than for incidents.
Three shapes cover most of what a group will find. A branch that goes dark in the evening and is back by morning is tripping the five minute rule or being switched off by hand. A branch missing for a long unbroken run is a compliance case rather than an operational one. A branch that is present for one fulfilment type and absent for the other is an hours edit that was only half done.
The comparison has to be per restaurant because the platform is per restaurant, and that is the part groups get wrong. A brand level availability figure averages a good estate with a bad branch and hides exactly the site that is losing the Local Legend criterion, the orders and the marketing priority at the same time. What answers the question is the same measurement repeated separately for every branch, so the estate can be ranked rather than summarised, and building that per branch ranking from the customer side is what Kitchain (kitchain.co) collects across a Just Eat estate.