Delivery Hero Biting at the Heels of Just-Eat

Full acquisition of hungryhouse.co.uk and EatitNow put Delivery Hero ahead in the takeaway race

Today, online food delivery company Delivery Hero announces a full takeover of hungryhouse.co.uk, a partnership which has proven to be a serious threat in the competitive international market. Delivery Hero already initiated a merger with hungryhouse in March 2012, and since then the UK site tripled the size of its business. hungryhouse is today generating more than £6 million in sales to its 11,000 restaurants every month.

The acquisition was made as a share swap, with hungryhouse founders deciding to stay involved. “We believe there is still a lot of growth potential left in this business, and so we re-invested 98% of the purchase price of our shares into Delivery Hero,” says hungryhouse Co-founder Tony Charles. “We had always planned to make an exit, but the opportunity to continue the Delivery Hero success story was too much fun to turn down!”

Charles will be taking a leading role over product innovation, an area the company will be heavily focusing on in the year ahead. “Innovation is incredibly important for us and we are very happy to have Tony leading this department,” says Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg. “Together with Tony we hope to keep the leading edge to our competitors on the product side.”

With an ambition to further challenge rivals Just-Eat, Delivery Hero also acquired another player in the UK market, EatitNow.co.uk, and from 24th January 2013, hungryhouse took over all their orders.

In just two years, Delivery Hero has become the largest restaurant network for online food ordering in the world. The company helps over 33,000 restaurants across 12 countries to increase takeaway orders and keep up with technological demands. “The market is tight and we want to push out cutting edge technology to revolutionize the online food ordering space,” Östberg said. “Thanks to the passion and enthusiasm of our teams around the world we will continue to build a world class service. We have only seen the start.”