UK delivery partner terms: the five clauses to read first
Restaurant chains sign delivery agreements the way they sign utility contracts and then discover the interesting parts during a crisis. Reading all of it is unrealistic and unnecessary. Five clauses decide what happens on your worst day, and they take twenty minutes to find and read across all three UK platforms. Everything else can wait until a lawyer needs it. These five are the ones an operations director should be able to summarise from memory.
Clause one: what allows them to switch you off
The suspension power. Look for what triggers it, whether it is automatic, and whether it distinguishes between suspending part of the service and ending it.
Deliveroo’s hygiene policy states that it “forms part of your agreement” and that it “will investigate and may take action (including suspending the provision of our services) if you breach these obligations”. That is broad by design.
The question to answer is whether anything can happen without a human deciding. Where a threshold is published, the answer is usually yes.
Clause two: the eligibility conditions you depend on
Not the contract itself but the programme rules, because those are where your volume actually comes from.
Just Eat publishes four criteria for Local Legend, held “for two consecutive quarters”, including “Time offline at 10% or below” and an “FSA rating of 3+ or a ‘Pass'”. Deliveroo requires an FSA rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'” for Marketer.
Know which of these your sites are relying on, and how far each site is from failing one.
Clause three: notice, if there is any
What you are told, and when, before something changes.
In UK documents this tends to be thin. In the European Union it is not: Regulation 2019/1150 requires a statement of reasons before or at the time a restriction takes effect, 30 days before termination, and at least 15 days before terms change. We have not verified an equivalent UK duty, so read what your own document says rather than assuming.
Where there is no notice provision, plan on finding out from your own monitoring.
Clause four: the route back
Who decides you are reinstated, and what evidence they want.
Deliveroo describes it concretely for hygiene: make the improvements, request a re-visit from the local authority, and once you hold a rating of 2 or above, “provide confirmation of your new Rating to your account manager who will arrange for you to be reinstated”.
A route that names a person and a document is one you can follow. A route that says the platform will review at its discretion is one you should ask to have clarified before you need it.
Clause five: what happens to your data
Reviews, rating history and order history, and what happens to them on suspension, termination or a change of operator.
This is the clause nobody reads and the one that bites during a franchise handover or a site sale. History attached to an account rather than to a brand can vanish with the account, and a site can reopen with the same sign and no reputation.
What is missing from all five?
Any commitment about the cost of an interruption the platform caused.
None of the UK documents we have read allocates that, and none publishes an availability record you could measure it with. So the evidential side is yours to build, and it has to exist before anybody needs it. A Kitchain (kitchain.co) series is what stands in the missing sixth clause’s place, since the contract declines to write one.