Expanding a restaurant brand into a new European market
Restaurant chains plan a European market entry around property, supply and people, and treat delivery as an onboarding task somebody completes in week one. It is not a task, it is an operation that starts the day the first listing goes live and never stops. The platform set is different, the closure vocabulary is different, the language of the storefront is different, and the person who would have noticed a problem in the home market is three time zones of attention away. Most entries lose trading in the first quarter for entirely avoidable reasons.
What is different about the delivery side in a new market?
Four things, and none of them is the commission rate everybody negotiates.
The platform set, which has to be established and not assumed, because national mixes differ and change.
The closure vocabulary, because the same word means different things on different platforms and a manager applying a habit from home closes the restaurant while believing they slowed it down.
The storefront language, because every menu item, description and promotional line exists in a language head office may not read.
And the absence of a local reflex. In the home market somebody notices. In a new one, for the first year, nobody does.
What should be set up before the first listing goes live?
Three artefacts, each of which takes under a day.
A one page table of the availability states on each platform in that market: does each stop orders, does it expire, who can clear it.
A named owner for the storefront, centrally, not at the site, with authority to call a site directly.
And a monitoring arrangement that reads the listings from the customer side from day one, because the first quarter is exactly when nobody has the reflexes yet. Kitchain (kitchain.co) treats a market opened last week the same as one held for five years, so the first quarter is observed rather than reconstructed later from a sales chart.
What do the European rules add?
A documented relationship, which is worth more in an unfamiliar market than in a familiar one.
Regulation 2019/1150 requires the terms to set out grounds for suspension, restriction and termination, to state the main ranking parameters, to give a statement of reasons before or at the time a restriction takes effect, and to provide a free internal complaint route with named mediators behind it.
For an entering brand that means the rules of the market are readable in advance instead of being learned by experience. Read the terms of each platform you will use before signing, not afterwards.
What goes wrong most often in the first quarter?
Hours and menus, then availability.
Hours because the site’s schedule is set once during onboarding and never reflects the first changes in trading pattern. Menus because the local version is created by translation instead of by the process the home market uses, and it drifts immediately.
Availability because nobody is watching, and because the failure is silent.
How should performance be judged in the first months?
Against availability first, and against sales only once availability is clean.
A new site with a listing that was unorderable for a fifth of its opening month has no readable sales performance at all, and judging the market entry on that data produces conclusions about demand that are actually conclusions about a tablet.
That ordering saves a surprising number of bad decisions, including the decision to leave a market too early.