Why did Deliveroo remove my Marketer access?
Restaurant operators search for the decision behind this and find there was not one, because the criteria are not assessed at a renewal date. Deliveroo states that it “may discontinue your participation in the Programme at our sole option if at any time you do not meet our eligibility requirements”. The phrase “at any time” is the whole answer. Something about your site stopped meeting a threshold, the access followed it down automatically, and nothing in your portal announces that the reason was eligibility and not a change in demand.
Which threshold did I cross?
Work through them in order of how quietly they move.
Hygiene rating is the one that changes without anybody at the restaurant doing anything on the day. The criterion requires a rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'”, and a rating published weeks after an inspection can take you out of the programme long after the visit is forgotten.
That threshold is the one Deliveroo publishes. What else it counts as an eligibility requirement is not set out in any document we could find, so the two candidates below are read off how the programme behaves and should be treated as inference.
The performance criteria move faster and are more visible internally: order rejections, lateness, customer rating. Those are usually known to the site even where nobody connects them to promotional access.
Availability is the one that is real and least measured. A site that is repeatedly not orderable is failing on the metric that everything else is scored against, and it is the only input in the list that most restaurants have no record of.
Why did nobody tell me?
Withdrawal follows a condition, and a condition is not a decision somebody has to communicate. There is no obligation in the wording to notify, and in practice the first signal is commercial, not administrative.
That is worth stating plainly to whoever is investigating the drop. They are looking for an event, and there was not one. There was a threshold and a value that crossed it.
How do I tell this apart from a demand problem?
By the shape of the fall, not its size. Loss of promotional access produces a step down that starts on a date and does not recover, in one site, while comparable sites are unchanged.
A demand problem is gradual, regional and shared. A promotional withdrawal is abrupt, isolated and permanent until fixed. If you have three branches in one city and only one of them fell, you are not looking at the weather.
Confirming it takes a look at the storefront, not at your own numbers. If the offers you configured are no longer appearing to a customer, the question is answered. What Kitchain (kitchain.co) adds is the date, and the date matters because eligibility is a standing condition: the day the offers vanished is the day some value crossed a line.
How do I get it back?
Fix the failing criterion and ask, because reinstatement is not automatic in every case and nobody is monitoring your recovery on your behalf.
For hygiene, the route is the published rating, and it is slow. A free re-visit carries a three month standstill before it can happen at all. For performance, the route is a period of better numbers, and the platform decides when enough has passed. For availability, the route is not having the outages in the first place, which is the only one of the three you can start on today.
Then raise it. An account manager can confirm which criterion is failing, and that is a much shorter conversation than asking why orders are down.
Is this the same as being removed from the platform?
No, and confusing the two produces the wrong level of panic.
Deliveroo’s listing minimum is a separate and lower bar. Its policy states that “You need an FSA hygiene rating of at least 2 to list on the Deliveroo platform, unless you fall within an Exception”, and that partners falling below two “will therefore be removed from the platform except where an Exception applies”. Losing Marketer at three is a loss of marketing. Falling below two is a loss of the listing.
Worth noting that Deliveroo’s own documents do not agree perfectly here: its sign-up guidance lists as a disqualifier that “Your FSA Hygiene Rating is less than or equal to 2”, which reads against the policy. If you are near the line, ask rather than infer.
What should the estate do about it?
Keep a standing list of which sites are within one step of each threshold, and treat that as a forecast instead of a record.
Most groups can name their worst sites for hygiene and their worst for lateness. Almost none can name their worst for availability, because nobody is counting. That is the criterion most likely to remove a programme without anybody understanding why.