How do I become a Just Eat Local Legend?
Restaurant operators usually want the shortest route in, and the honest answer is that three of the four criteria are things you already manage and the fourth is one most restaurants cannot see. Just Eat sets four conditions, all held “for two consecutive quarters”: 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”. The last one decides more applications than anybody expects.
Why is the offline criterion the hard one?
It is the only condition measured entirely by the platform, from behaviour the restaurant does not record.
Order volume appears in your own reports. Review rating appears on your listing. Hygiene rating is a public figure with a known date. All three can be checked this afternoon by somebody in the office.
Time offline cannot. A portal shows whether you are open now, not what share of the last quarter you were closed, and no partner report reconstructs it in an auditable form. So a restaurant applying for the programme is being graded on a number it has never seen.
What counts as offline?
Any period the listing was not orderable during hours you were supposed to be trading, whatever the cause.
That includes the causes nobody would volunteer: a tablet that lost connection, a pause set during a rush and forgotten, an automatic closure after a run of rejections, a device left charging overnight. From the platform’s side these are indistinguishable from a deliberate closure, and all of them count.
The distinction between chosen and unchosen downtime is meaningful inside a restaurant and meaningless in the measurement.
Two consecutive quarters is a long time. What does that imply?
That a single bad fortnight costs you six months rather than two weeks.
Because the window is consecutive, a breach in month five resets the count instead of trimming it. A restaurant that has held three criteria comfortably and then loses a weekend to a device failure starts the clock again, and will not qualify until two full quarters later.
That asymmetry is the argument for watching availability continuously instead of reviewing it quarterly. By the time a quarterly review shows a problem, the quarter that contained it is already spent.
Ten percent of what, exactly?
Of your trading time, which means the denominator is the hours you told the platform you are open.
That produces an effect operators find counterintuitive. Extending your published hours increases the denominator, which makes the same absolute number of lost hours a smaller percentage. It also increases the surface on which unnoticed closures can occur, particularly late at night, when the building has gone quiet.
So the criterion rewards accurate published hours rather than optimistic ones, and a restaurant that lists hours it does not reliably staff is working against itself twice.
How do I actually track it?
By recording, day after day, whether the listing was orderable during your published hours, and doing it from the customer side, not from the portal.
That is what the criterion measures, so it is the only measurement that matches. Anything derived from your own systems describes what you intended, and the criterion scores what happened. Run against your published hours, a Kitchain (kitchain.co) series is the same arithmetic Just Eat is doing, and having it means the number is visible while the quarter is still open.
Is the programme worth chasing?
For a site near the thresholds, yes, because the criteria are things you should be holding anyway and the programme adds visibility on top.
For a site well below on order volume, the availability work still pays, because the same behaviour that fails this criterion is costing orders directly whether or not any programme is involved. The badge is a reason to measure. The measurement is the value.