My co-founders and I created and launched Take Eat Easy in the summer of 2012. Our objective was to enable quality restaurants to provide a reliable delivery service to their customers. About a year later, after having tested and proven the concept in Brussels, we expanded to Paris, raised a first round of VC funding in April 2015, and a second one in August 2015.
Over the last 12 months, we increased the size of the team from 10 to 160, scaled our operations from 2 to 20 cities, developed our restaurant partnerships from 450 to 3,200, and ultimately grew our customer base from 30,000 to 350,000.
About 1/3 of our customers become “active customers”, and once “hooked” order on average 1,5x/month. Actually, active customers order more and more frequently over time.
A couple of days ago we hit the 1 million order mark, yet today we are filing for judicial restructuring.
From 1,000,000 to ?
Why are we filing for judicial restructuring? The short answer is that 1) our revenue doesn’t cover our costs yet, and that 2) we haven’t been able to raise a third round of funding.
Our revenue doesn’t cover our costs yet
Take Eat Easy’s business model is fairly simple. On each order, we charge the restaurant a 25-30% commission, and a 2,5€ delivery fee to the customer. With this c. 10€ of net revenue per order, we then have to pay the bicycle courier.
Contribution Margin is thus a function of Restaurant Commission, Average Order Value, Delivery Fee and Delivery Cost.
Courier utilisation is one of the most important metrics in our business. Assuming couriers need to make minimum 15€ per hour not to churn, a low courier utilisation implies a negative contribution margin.
Our job is to align supply and demand in time and space, and over the last few months, we were getting pretty good at this. Our Tech & Ops teams focused their efforts on:
- Automatic optimisation and dispatching of orders to couriers and restaurants
- Capacity planning based on internal and external factors
- Deep integration in restaurant operations through our partner app
Contribution Margin has been steadily improving and is now positive across the group, though not yet high enough to cover our fixed costs.
We haven’t been able to raise a third round of funding
Despite the above, we haven’t been able to raise additional capital to fuel the company until break-even.
We’ve started working on our Series C in October 2015. We knew we had to gear up as one of our own investor acquired and invested aggressively in a direct competitor, now Foodora, and Deliveroo had just raised a massive round of funding. Unfortunately for us, they raised and announced an even bigger round a couple of weeks later.
In March 2016, after having been rejected by 114 VC funds, we signed a term sheet with a French, state-owned, logistics group, for a 30m€ investment.
Unfortunately, after 3 months of intensive due diligence, their board rejected the deal and they ended up withdrawing their offer. We were negotiating with them under an exclusivity agreement, didn’t have a plan B, and only had a couple of weeks of run-way left.
For the last 8 weeks, we’ve desperately tried to find solutions to keep the business alive. We’ve worked on both financing and acquisitions deals in parallel, unfortunately none of them materialised. We have now ran out of time to keep operating business as usual, and are filing for judicial restructuring.
We have launched Take Eat Easy out of passion, for on demand-logistics, technology, great food and even greater service.
We have launched Take Eat Easy out of a genuine belief that we could make your life tastier.
Thank you
A special thank you to all restaurants, couriers, photographers, and other partners who have worked with us and made this adventure possible.
On-demand delivery is dead. Long live on-demand delivery!
Adrien, Co-founder & CEO
Good luck Just-Eat!