Online takeaway business EasyFood, backed by EasyJet tycoon Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, is offering its services for free to new restaurant partners in an expansion drive.
The company is offering three months’ free subscription to the next 1,000 restaurants to sign up as it expands from Birmingham into Wolverhampton, Walsall, Coventry and Dudley.
EasyFood aims to challenge Just Eat by providing restaurants with a way of taking online orders but charging them a subscription fee instead of commission. Launched in April this year, the business has ambitions to expand nationally before extending the service to convenience stores.
Orders are placed on EasyFood’s website or app and restaurants are given handheld terminals to change menus and prices. Restaurants despatch the orders themselves but the aim is to extend the service to include delivery before moving into grocery.
“There’s quite a few last-mile delivery companies now popping up,” said EasyFood co-founder Jeewan Sagu. “We’ve had offers to take on the whole delivery arm, which we’re in talks about. Early next year we’ll start the process of putting something in place across the UK.”
Sagu said the ambition remained “100%” to move into grocery once the company had “mastered” the restaurant offering.
“I think we’re probably still about 12 months away from where we can start planning to go into grocery shops,” he said. “We’ve got all the tech ready for it, so it’s a very quick solution to put in.”
He said the immediate focus was on building on 200 existing restaurant partners in Birmingham by offering the 1,000 three-month free subscriptions in the surrounding areas.
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“We’re running smoothly now and we’re in the position that we want to start to expand and take this to the next level.
“We’ve got a lot of ambition from Stelios as well. He wants to conquer the UK very quickly. But we have to make sure it’s paced right and we’re doing it in the best possible way, because we want to deliver success to the restaurant owners.
“It’s with the subscription offer that we’ll be getting more on board, so we’ll have salespeople on the ground as well as our telesales team engaging with them.”
EasyFood claims to offer restaurants savings of hundreds of pounds a month, with subscription packages starting at £100 instead of commission charges on every order.
Sagu and business partner Gurpreet Sidhu were sent a “cease and desist” letter by Haji-Ioannou’s lawyers after founding the business, but the billionaire was later convinced to buy a one-third stake.
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