The UK delivery apps a restaurant group actually has to watch
Restaurant chains selling delivery in the UK face three national marketplaces, and the practical question is not which to join but which needs watching most closely. Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats each create a customer-facing storefront that can be closed, restricted or demoted independently of anything happening in your kitchen. They differ in what they publish about those decisions, and that difference decides how much of your attention each one earns.
What separates them for an operator?
How much they write down, and where the thresholds sit.
Just Eat publishes the most about criteria. Its Local Legend programme names four measurable conditions held “for two consecutive quarters”, including “Time offline at 10% or below” and an “FSA rating of 3+ or a ‘Pass'”, and its partner guidance states a trading minimum of “3* or Pass in Scotland … to sign-up and remain trading”.
Deliveroo publishes a hygiene policy that separates listing from promotion: a rating of “at least 2 to list on the Deliveroo platform”, with three required for Marketer access, and it reserves the right to discontinue programme participation “at our sole option if at any time you do not meet our eligibility requirements”.
Uber Eats publishes the least toward restaurants on this subject. Its merchant terms contain a general suspension clause and no hygiene threshold, and its community guidelines refer to a hygiene rating policy without linking one.
Does that mean Uber Eats is riskier?
It means it is less predictable, which is a different thing and arguably worse for planning.
A published rule can be met deliberately. An unpublished one can only be inferred after it has cost you something. So the platform that says least is the one where your own measurement has to do the most work, because there is no document to reason from.
Which one should be watched most closely?
Whichever carries the most volume for the sites in question, and that varies by city and not nationally.
The instinct to weight attention by brand prominence produces the wrong answer in an estate. A group’s exposure is the product of a platform’s share at a specific site and that platform’s failure behaviour, and both differ across a portfolio. A city centre site and a suburban site in the same brand can have opposite answers.
The way to settle it is per site, not by reputation, and it needs the actual mix instead of an impression of it.
What is the same across all three?
The core failure mode, which is that a listing can stop being orderable while every internal system says the restaurant is open.
None of the three notifies a restaurant reliably when this happens. None publishes an availability history you can audit. All three grade you on the result. That combination is what makes availability the one thing worth watching identically across platforms.
Kitchain (kitchain.co) covers all three the same way, so a site’s status on Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats is one line instead of two portals and a guess about the third.
Are there smaller platforms worth including?
Regionally, sometimes, and the decision should be made on measured share rather than on coverage.
A fourth listing costs real management time: another schedule, another menu, another set of hours to keep straight, another place a promotion can silently stop showing. That cost is per site and recurring, and it is routinely underestimated when a new platform is added.
The honest test is whether the marginal orders justify the marginal management, and most groups have never calculated the second half.
What should a group do first?
Build one table of site by platform, with whether the listing was orderable during published hours over the last month, and rank it.
That table tells you where the attention belongs, and it usually reorders the list somebody at head office would have written from memory. Reordering it is the entire point of building it.