Who owns the delivery listing, the franchisor or the franchisee?
Restaurant chains that franchise discover the answer at the worst possible time, which is when a listing is doing something they want stopped. In most UK arrangements the franchisee signs with the platform, holds the account, controls the hours, the menu and the promotions, and the franchisor holds only the brand that appears above all of it. That split is workable until the two interests diverge, and nothing in a platform’s tooling is designed to arbitrate between them.
Why does the franchisee usually hold the account?
The platform contracts with the entity that operates the premises and takes the payments, and that is the franchisee.
Commission, payouts, tax and food safety responsibility all attach to the operating business. Just Eat’s hygiene requirement, for instance, is stated against the restaurant partner, and hygiene ratings attach to premises and their operator rather than to a brand.
So the account structure follows the legal reality, not the brand hierarchy, and any control the franchisor wants has to be negotiated on top of it.
What can a franchisee change without asking?
More than most franchisors assume. Typically hours, prices, item availability, promotional participation and the delivery zone, plus the ability to close the store outright.
Each of those is a brand decision in the franchisor’s mind and an operating decision in the platform’s. A franchisee who raises prices to cover commission, or pauses the store on a slow Tuesday, is doing something entirely permitted by the platform and possibly prohibited by the franchise agreement.
The gap is not technical. It is that the agreement was written before the storefront existed.
How does head office find out what changed?
Usually from a customer complaint, a mystery shop, or a quarterly review, which is to say weeks or months later.
Platforms do not report changes upward to a brand that is not on the account. There is no feed of what a franchisee altered and when. So the franchisor is in the position of being accountable for a shopfront it cannot see.
The only reliable answer is to look at the storefront directly, on a schedule, as a customer does. A franchisor holding a Kitchain (kitchain.co) record of each franchised listing is no longer asking a franchisee what changed, it is telling them the date on which the price moved.
What should the franchise agreement say?
Three things it usually does not.
That the franchisee grants the franchisor visibility of the delivery storefront, whether by account access, by a nominated read-only user, or by accepting third party monitoring.
That specified elements are brand-controlled: menu structure, item naming, price bands, and participation in brand-wide promotions.
And that availability is a performance obligation rather than a matter of local discretion, with an agreed way of measuring it. That last one is worth naming precisely, because a clause requiring a site to be open is unenforceable if nobody records whether it was.
Can a franchisor be listed as an additional user?
Often yes, and it is the cheapest first step, but it is not a substitute for measurement.
Account access shows you settings, not outcomes. It tells you what a franchisee entered and not whether the listing was actually orderable last Friday evening. For a brand, the outcome is the thing that matters, because that is what the customer experienced and what the platform graded.
What happens when a franchisee leaves?
The listing goes with the account, and that is the moment brands discover what they did not control.
Reviews, rating history, order history and sometimes the listing’s ranking are attached to the account and not to the brand. A site changing hands can therefore restart from nothing while sitting in the same building with the same sign.
That is worth planning for in the agreement instead of negotiating during a handover, and it is a stronger practical argument for brand-side visibility than any of the day to day ones.