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Just Eat Takeaway: The Rise, Hubris, and Fall of Europe's Food Delivery Champion
I. Introduction: The €7 Billion Question
On the evening of November 13, 2024, Jitse Groen found himself in Amsterdam signing away an American empire. Just Eat Takeaway announced the sale of Grubhub to Wonder for $650 million—far less than the $7.3 billion it had paid for the U.S. food delivery company in 2021. As analyst Clement Genelot bluntly noted, the group had "destroyed more than $7 billion in shareholder value" in America.
Three months later, in February 2025, the final chapter arrived. Prosus, the global technology company, announced it had reached a conditional agreement to acquire Just Eat Takeaway for €4.1 billion, creating the fourth largest food delivery group globally. The offer valued Just Eat's shares at €20.30 each, representing a 22% premium over its highest share price in the past three months, though a fraction of its pandemic-era peak of over €100 per share.
The central question animating this story: How did a 21-year-old Dutch student's dorm room project become one of the world's largest food delivery platforms—and why did it end with a €4.1 billion takeout by Prosus after destroying billions in shareholder value? The acquisition followed years of decline for Just Eat Takeaway, which at its height during the COVID-19 pandemic reached a valuation of €20 billion.
The year-end market capitalization of Just Eat Takeaway peaked in 2020 at $16.9 billion. By 2024, the company's market capitalization stood at $3.58 billion following consecutive declines since 2020. That's an 80% destruction of value in just four years.
This is a story about the aggregator versus delivery model debate, the "winner takes most" fallacy, the perils of cross-border M&A in commoditized markets, and how a founder-led company navigated hypergrowth only to stumble at the moment of greatest ambition. It's also the story of two companies—Takeaway.com and Just Eat—born within a year of each other on opposite sides of the North Sea, destined to merge, expand into America, and ultimately retreat back to Europe under new ownership.
On October 2, 2025, Prosus declared its offer unconditional. As Jitse Groen said, "As the tender offer has now been made unconditional, I would like to congratulate Fabricio and his team on the acquisition." Prosus acquired 98.19% of the shares and initiated statutory squeeze-out proceedings to obtain 100%, with Just Eat Takeaway delisting on November 17, 2025.
The bootstrapped startup that took twelve years to raise institutional money had come full circle—going private again, this time under a South African tech giant that had been pursuing it since 2019.
II. Origins: A Student's Frustration Becomes a Business (2000–2003)
The Founding Story
Picture the Netherlands in 2000. The dot-com bubble hadn't yet burst. Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school. And in the quiet village of 't Veld in North Holland, a 21-year-old business information technology student named Jitse Groen was trying to order takeaway for a family birthday celebration.
Groen founded Takeaway.com (originally known as Thuisbezorgd.nl) in 2000, at the age of 21, while he was a student in Business Information Technology at the University of Twente. He came up with the idea for his business after being unable to get a takeaway delivery in North Holland for a birthday celebration with his family. The nearest options for takeaway delivery were in Amsterdam, which was about 60 kilometres (37 mi) away.
The frustration was simple but profound: Why couldn't you browse menus online and order food to a rural Dutch address? He started the company, then known as Thuisbezorgd.nl, in 2000 from his university dorm room after being frustrated by the lack of online options for ordering food. A self-taught coder, he built the initial platform himself.
Groen was born in Delft in 1978 and raised in the villages Kolhorn and 't Veld. His mother worked as a teacher and his father was an automation engineer. He studied business information technology at the University of Twente, but never completed his bachelor's degree.
This is the archetypal founder origin story: a personal pain point, technical skills to solve it, and the naïveté to think building a platform connecting restaurants to customers was a reasonable side project for a university student. As Groen later reflected: "I was never an entrepreneur, so I taught myself to be an entrepreneur."
The Early Struggles
The early years were brutal. The company initially tried to expand beyond food. Back in 1999 when Jitse was a college student, the idea of making a website came into his mind. He was attending a party in Noord-Holland and wanted to order a pizza. But, unfortunately, the online service showed that it wouldn't be able to deliver his choice of food at the given address. And, that's how this tech guy came up with the idea of founding his online company to serve his nation.
The platform launched as an online directory, initially operating solely within the Dutch market. In its early years, Thuisbezorgd.nl focused on aggregating menus from local restaurants and facilitating orders primarily through telephone calls to the establishments, rather than direct digital transactions. This model emphasized connecting consumers with nearby eateries, allowing users to browse options and contact providers directly via phone.
But the timing was terrible. Broadband penetration in the Netherlands was still nascent. Most Dutch households connected via dial-up, making online ordering an exercise in frustration. Restaurants were skeptical of this young student asking them to list their menus on a website nobody had heard of.
The partnership that helped launch the company didn't survive. Jitse continued working for other companies and didn't devote all his time to Takeaway.com at the beginning. So, his first big fundraising happened in 2012. That's right—twelve years of bootstrapping before institutional money.
To survive, Groen relied on something most founders don't have the patience for: student loans. For years, he kept himself financially afloat through educational funding while building the platform piece by piece. The co-founder who helped start the company departed because growth was simply too slow.
The Broadband Inflection Point
Then, around 2003, something shifted. When Jitse founded the company in 2000, he mainly opened it for delivering kebabs and pizza. But eventually his business expanded and emerged as one of the top online food delivery companies in the Netherlands.
Broadband internet was becoming mainstream in the Netherlands, and suddenly the friction of placing an online order disappeared. Pages loaded in seconds rather than minutes. Credit card payments became more trusted. And Groen's platform—which had been sitting there, accumulating restaurant listings, refining its interface—was positioned perfectly.
The lesson? Being too early to a market is often indistinguishable from being wrong. But Groen's stubbornness, his willingness to live on student loans while waiting for the market to catch up, proved to be the difference between a failed student project and a billion-euro company.
He left his studies to focus on the company, never completing his bachelor's degree—a bet that would pay off beyond imagination.
III. The Bootstrapped Years: Building a Dutch Champion (2003–2012)
The Marketplace Model
While Silicon Valley was raising hundreds of millions for consumer internet startups, Jitse Groen was building Takeaway.com the old-fashioned way: profitably, customer by customer, restaurant by restaurant.
The business model was elegantly simple—what the industry calls "asset-light" or the "aggregator model." Restaurants handle their own delivery; the platform takes a commission. Restaurants' traditional profit margins of 7 to 22 percent make covering the platforms' delivery commissions, roughly 15 to 30 percent, unsustainable as delivery orders become a larger part of a restaurant's business. But in the early days, this was incremental revenue for restaurants, not a threat to their core economics.
Takeaway.com charged restaurants around 12-13% commission for each order placed through the platform. The company focused on restaurants that already had their own delivery infrastructure—pizza shops, Chinese takeaways, kebab houses—and positioned itself as a customer acquisition channel rather than a logistics operation.
This distinction would prove crucial. While later entrants like Deliveroo and Uber Eats would build massive courier networks, burning cash to subsidize deliveries, Takeaway.com remained profitable in its core markets by avoiding the "last mile" delivery problem entirely.
The competitive landscape was still fragmented, allowing the company to become a dominant player in its initial markets. The strategy: own the Netherlands completely before thinking about expansion. The company is especially huge in home country The Netherlands (Thuisbezorgd.nl), where it's also market leader, and neighbor country Belgium (Pizza.be). In other countries like Germany (Lieferservice.de) and Austria (Lieferservice.at) the company is active with "some serious market share." Takeaway.com is a profitable company and is said to grow with 50% year on year.
Parallel Origin Story: Just Eat in Denmark
Meanwhile, 500 miles northwest across the North Sea, another group of entrepreneurs was building an eerily similar company.
Five Danish entrepreneurs, including Jesper Buch, founded Just Eat in Denmark and launched the service in August 2001. The company started with 15 employees.
In 2001, Jesper Buch, alongside four other Danish entrepreneurs, launched Just Eat from a basement in Kolding, Denmark. The parallels are striking: both companies founded around 2000-2001, both solving the same problem, both proving out the marketplace model in small European markets.
His journey began in a basement in Denmark, where he launched Just Eat in 2000. By 2004, the company was breaking even, and a year later, he expanded to the UK with just-eat.co.uk.
But Buch had a different vision for expansion. Jesper Buch strongly believed that a launch from London—the financial capital of the globe—would take them to a different level. He moved to London in 2006 and launched Just Eat UK in March with David Buttress heading the team.
Launched in Denmark in 2001, the team slowly realised they had built a great service for local businesses, but in a country with a relatively small interest in takeaways. However, about 500 miles west across the North Sea was a country responsible for 50 percent of the food delivery spend in Europe, the UK.
This strategic insight—that the UK was where the real opportunity lay—would shape the next two decades of European food delivery. Next step was international expansion, this started with launch in Netherlands in July 2007.
The two companies that would eventually merge were born within a year of each other on opposite sides of the North Sea. Their paths would cross, diverge, and ultimately converge in what became one of the largest mergers in European food tech history.
IV. The VC Era & IPO: Going From Bootstrapped to Billion-Dollar (2012–2016)
First Institutional Capital
After twelve years of bootstrapping—an eternity by Silicon Valley standards—Jitse Groen finally accepted outside money. Prime Ventures backed his pioneering spirit, helping Takeaway.com become Europe's leading food delivery portal. Prime led Series A in 2012, raised Series B in 2014, and supported the IPO in 2016.
Takeaway.com received 74 million euros worth of funding from investment companies Macquarie Capital and Prime Ventures. It's not the first time the Dutch company got funding as it received an investment of 13 million euros from Prime Ventures back in 2012.
Why wait so long? Groen's answer reveals his philosophy: he didn't need the money. Takeaway.com was profitable. The company was growing. Taking VC meant giving up control and accepting pressure to grow at any cost. For Groen, that tradeoff only made sense when the company needed capital for acquisitions—not for operations.
As a startup, Takeaway raised just under $118 million since being founded way back in 2000, with investors including MacQuarie and Prime Ventures.
The Bitcoin Experiment and Series B
In a moment that now seems quaint, the company began accepting Bitcoin in November 2013—one of the earliest mainstream consumer companies to do so. It was a signal that Takeaway.com saw itself as a tech-forward platform, not just a restaurant directory.
The €74 million Series B in 2014, led by Macquarie Capital and Prime Ventures, gave the company firepower for expansion. "With this new funding we are able to expand our market share even faster", said founder and CEO Jitse Groen. His company facilitated more than a million orders for over 25 thousand restaurants in nine different countries every month.
Just Eat's London IPO (2014)
While Takeaway.com was still private, Just Eat made a bold move. The market valued the company at ÂŁ1.47 billion ($2.44 billion), at 260 pence per share. This was top of the pricing range the company was after and put its value at over 100 times its EBITDA and 15 times sales.
The U.K. company was valued at ÂŁ1.47 billion ($2.43 billion) on flotation after its stock was priced at 260 pence per share, the top end of its range. Just Eat's shares rose to 285 pence on the open, a 9.6 percent jump. The company, which was founded in Denmark in 2001, expects to raise ÂŁ360.1 million by selling nearly a quarter of the shares in the firm.
Just Eat's flotation was the first ever on the LSE's "high growth segment," a special section of the exchange aimed at encouraging high-growth companies to list.
The IPO validated the food delivery model and put pressure on every competitor in Europe to either raise capital or get acquired.
Takeaway.com's Amsterdam IPO (2016)
Two years later, Takeaway.com followed suit. It was Takeaway.com's turn, an Amsterdam-based company with operations across Europe, which listed on Euronext Amsterdam. Takeaway.com priced its shares at €23 each ($25.82), giving the company an enterprise value of around €849 million ($952 million) and a market cap of around €993 million ($1.1 billion). Takeaway.com offered 7,608,696 shares, for a value of €328 million ($368 million) in the offering.
As a result of the IPO (and after the full exercise of the Over-allotment Option), Mr. Jitse Groen, through his holding company Gribhold B.V., held approximately 35.4% of the Shares and Prime Ventures held approximately 23.1% of the Shares.
The UK Market Swap
Then something remarkable happened—something that revealed the rationality underlying the apparently chaotic food delivery wars. In August 2016, Just Eat sold its operations in the Netherlands and Belgium to its Dutch competitor Takeaway.com for €22.5 million. Whereas Takeaway.com sold its UK operations to Just Eat also in 2016.
Rather than burning cash fighting each other in their opponent's home market, the two companies simply swapped territories. Just Eat got the UK; Takeaway.com got the Netherlands and Belgium. It was a rational market allocation that preserved profitability for both.
This discipline—the willingness to retreat from unwinnable battles—would define pre-2019 Takeaway.com. It's also what made the later Grubhub acquisition so puzzling.
V. The Acquisition Machine: European Consolidation (2016–2019)
The Germany Play
With public market capital and a proven playbook, Takeaway.com transformed into an acquisition machine. The prize: Germany, Europe's largest economy and a market where online food delivery penetration remained surprisingly low.
The deal covered all of Delivery Hero's operations in Germany, which included the Lieferheld, Pizza.de and foodora brands, which would merge with Takeaway.com's Lieferando.de brand. The financial terms: €508 million in cash and 9.5 million Takeaway.com shares worth c. €422 million, giving Delivery Hero an 18 percent share of Takeaway.com. Delivery Hero also got a seat on the board unless it sold off shares that brought its holding to less than 9.99 percent.
"This transaction provides Takeaway.com with a stronger proposition for both consumers and partner restaurants in the German market," said Jitse Groen. "It also allows Takeaway.com to operate on a significantly larger scale which is essential in building a profitable online food delivery business. Although the transaction almost doubles Takeaway.com's orders in Germany, there is still ample growth ahead, given that penetration of online food delivery in Germany is amongst the lowest in Europe."
Delivery Hero agreed to sell its German operations to Dutch competitor Takeaway.com for €930 million. Takeaway.com paid €508 million in cash. The remainder was paid in new shares, giving Delivery Hero an 18% stake in Takeaway.com.
The logic was sound. Takeaway.com had the winning hand: it was growing more than twice as fast in Germany. It benefitted from having one unified German brand with Lieferando, resulting in more efficient marketing (lower cost per acquisition). This meant it could out-spend its rival on (mostly offline) marketing.
International Expansion and Contraction
But not every bet worked. The company had earlier expanded into Asia, acquiring Vietnammm.com in 2013. By 2019, it recognized that winning in Asia required a different playbook entirely. Takeaway.com agreed to sell its interest in Takeaway.com Asia (Vietnammm.com) to Woowa Brothers, with completion on February 15, 2019.
This was the disciplined Takeaway.com: willing to admit when a market wasn't working and exit gracefully.
The company also acquired Israeli food delivery company 10bis for €135 million in 2018, along with local Bulgarian startup BGmenu.com and its Romanian subsidiary Oliviera.ro.
Just Eat's Parallel Expansion
On the other side, Just Eat was pursuing its own roll-up strategy across different geographies. In May 2015, Just Eat announced that it would buy Menulog, an Australian food ordering company for A$855 million, and would fund the deal by issuing new shares. In July 2015, Just Eat acquired Orderit.ca, a Canadian online food ordering company.
In December 2016, Just Eat announced that it was acquiring Hungryhouse from Delivery Hero for ÂŁ200m (with the possibility of a further ÂŁ40m if the company hit performance targets), and Canada's SkipTheDishes for C$110m (ÂŁ66m).
Both companies were mastering the roll-up playbook: acquire local leaders, consolidate operations, extract synergies. But a crucial question lingered: were they building a defensible business or just getting bigger?
VI. The Merger That Changed Everything: Just Eat + Takeaway.com (2019–2020)
The Bidding War
In July 2019, the food delivery industry's two European giants announced their intention to merge. But nothing in this industry comes easy.
The bid was hostile: Just Eat had been in the middle of working on a combination with Takeaway.com; and Just Eat wasted no time in asking its shareholders to reject the Prosus offer.
In 2019, Prosus attempted a hostile €6.1 billion bid for Just Eat before the company merged with Dutch competitor Takeaway.com.
Prosus' offer, which worked out to 710 pence per Just Eat Share, was 20% higher than Takeaway.com's offer of 594 pence (which itself was at a premium to Just Eat's share price). The Takeaway offer had been months in the making and had had a number of twists and turns. The first announcement for a $10 billion merger was made in July, but in the interim Prosus made its first hostile offer.
The strategic context made the battle comprehensible. Prosus had a 22% stake in the remaining DeliveryHero business (outside of Europe), alongside stakes in India's Swiggy and iFood in Latin America. This meant that Prosus taking over Just Eat would be less about consolidation of European holdings, which could be one reason why Just Eat was less keen on the idea.
Takeaway.com Wins
In what was effectively a David versus Goliath battle, the smaller Dutch company outbid one of the world's most powerful tech investors. In July 2019, Takeaway.com announced proposals to take over Just Eat. In January 2020, 80.4% of Just Eat shareholders approved Takeaway.com's acquisition deal.
Groen orchestrated the landmark ÂŁ6.2 billion merger with UK-based rival Just Eat in 2020. This created Just Eat Takeaway.com, one of the largest food delivery companies in the world outside of China.
Takeaway.com issued a response to the news, noting that it's the only one of the three that had been working on building profitability into the business: it was currently profitable in the Netherlands, its home market, and was on track to getting there in Germany. "Takeaway.com now operates in two out of the world's four major profit pools. Including the UK, the Just Eat Takeaway.com combination will therefore operate in three out of the four major profit pools globally available. This is in stark contrast with most other food delivery websites, which are loss-making, and in our opinion, will likely never become profitable."
Regulatory Hurdles
Although Just Eat became a subsidiary of Takeaway.com on 3 February 2020, the British Competition and Markets Authority ordered on the following day that no integration should take place and that the brands should be kept separate until their investigation was completed. On 23 April 2020, the Competition and Markets Authority announced that it was unconditionally approving Just Eat's merger with Takeaway.com.
The Combined Entity
Just Eat Takeaway.com N.V. is a Dutch multinational online food ordering and delivery company, formed from the merger of London-based Just Eat and Amsterdam-based Takeaway.com in 2020. It is the parent company of food delivery brands including Takeaway.com, Lieferando, Thuisbezorgd.nl, Pyszne.pl, 10bis in Israel, and those acquired from Just Eat, including SkipTheDishes and Menulog. The firm operates various food ordering and delivery platforms in twenty countries.
Jitse Groen had executed one of the most impressive deals in European tech history. The founder of a €1 billion company had orchestrated a reverse-takeover of a larger rival, fending off one of the world's most powerful tech investors. He emerged as CEO of a global food delivery giant.
But the merger closed in February 2020—just as a global pandemic was about to reshape everything.
VII. The Grubhub Disaster: Pandemic Hubris & Strategic Overreach (2020–2024)
The Deal
The pandemic was both a blessing and a curse for food delivery. Orders exploded as lockdowns kept people home. But it also created an environment of irrational exuberance—one that led to the worst acquisition in Just Eat Takeaway's history.
In June 2020, the company announced that it would acquire, in an all-stock transaction, US-based Grubhub—valuing the deal at $7.3 billion.
Groen spearheaded the $7.3 billion acquisition of US-based Grubhub in 2021, marking a significant and strategic entry into the competitive American market.
The strategic rationale seemed compelling on paper. The combined entity would have leadership positions in four of the world's most attractive markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. As Groen declared at the time: "I am excited that we can create the world's largest food delivery business outside China."
The Strategic Rationale (and its Flaws)
The problem was fundamental: Grubhub was already a distant third in the U.S. market, and the gap was widening.
Bloomberg Second Measure's transaction data analytics showed that in March 2024, DoorDash and its subsidiary Caviar earned 67 percent of observed U.S. consumers' meal delivery sales.
With a market share of 67 percent, DoorDash dominated the online food delivery market in the United States as of March 2024. Meanwhile, Uber Eats held the second highest share with 23 percent.
By the end of 2024, DoorDash led the national food delivery market with a 60.7% share, ahead of Uber Eats (26.1%) and Grubhub (6.3%).
Grubhub had pioneered online food ordering in America, but DoorDash—backed by SoftBank and venture funding—had outspent it on driver subsidies, restaurant partnerships, and customer acquisition. DoorDash ultimately widened its national market share lead among restaurant delivery companies. The Y-Combinator and SoftBank-backed company leveraged its significant funding to gain share through promotions and retention initiatives, despite losses.
The Write-Down and Sale Attempts
The problems emerged quickly. Just Eat Takeaway had been looking for a way to offload Grubhub for years. It initially announced plans to sell Grubhub in April 2022, caving to investor pressure as the company struggled to fend off competition from U.S. rivals like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
Ten months later—and after earlier denying rumors of a pending sale—the Netherlands-based Just Eat announced that it was "actively exploring" the possibility of a partial or full sale of Grubhub, or bringing in a strategic partner. Grubhub and other companies like it had seen their businesses soar during the pandemic, when people splurged on food delivery. But Grubhub began to struggle as the pandemic wound down and consumers—scared off by rising restaurant prices—began to seek cheaper food options.
In 2023, Groen said a combination of high price demands from some investors and a weak deal market meant the sale was proving "very difficult."
The Fire Sale
Europe's biggest meal delivery firm, Just Eat Takeaway, struck a deal to sell its U.S. unit Grubhub to Wonder for $650 million, sending its shares soaring 20% in early trading. The Amsterdam-listed company had been looking to offload Chicago-based Grubhub since as early as 2022, after acquiring it in 2020 in a $7.3 billion deal amid a pandemic-driven boom in delivery services.
After a wait of over two years, the deal assigned Grubhub an enterprise value of $650 million, but the company carried $500 million in debt. Factoring in other M&A costs, Just Eat Takeaway netted only $50 million, a fraction of the $7.3 billion valuation Grubhub had when it was acquired in an all-stock deal in 2021.
Let that sink in: a company acquired for $7.3 billion was sold for a net return of roughly $50 million. That's a 99% loss.
Grubhub's enterprise value of $650 million includes $500 million of senior notes and $150 million cash. Wonder is a food-delivery startup led by former Walmart executive Marc Lore.
The Grubhub acquisition stands as one of the worst tech M&A deals of the decade—a $7 billion mistake driven by pandemic euphoria, geographic ambition without competitive moat, and a fundamental underestimation of DoorDash's dominance.
VIII. The Unwinding: Retreat and Restructuring (2022–2024)
Market Exits
With Grubhub hemorrhaging value, Just Eat Takeaway began a painful process of retreat. The company withdrew from operations in Norway and Portugal in April 2022, and discontinued its operations in Romania in June 2022.
In July 2022, the company announced 390 redundancies in France, after its market capital fell following the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2023, Just Eat Takeaway announced 1,700 delivery driver redundancies in the UK, with drivers to work as gig workers (freelancers) instead of being employed. In July 2024, Just Eat announced its intention to leave France.
The food delivery firm has been slashing costs wherever possible in the past few years, selling off its stake in South American firm iFood in 2022 and cutting almost 2,000 jobs in 2023.
The Gig Economy Reversal
Perhaps the most poignant reversal concerned Groen's stance on worker classification. In 2021, Groen announced that all Just Eat workers would be entitled to minimum pay, sick pay and paid holiday, rather than being classed as gig workers. In 2021 Groen responded to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who criticized Groen for focusing his attention on his company's share price, by writing: "Start paying taxes, minimum wage and social security premiums before giving a founder advice on how he should run his business." In 2020 Groen announced plans to bring to an end the use of gig workers at his company, stating that "We want to be certain they do have benefits, that we do pay taxes on those workers."
But competitive pressures proved too severe. In 2023 it was announced that the company would return to an entirely self-employed gig worker model in Britain, a decision impacting around 1,870 workers.
The company had previously sought to structure its delivery network with employed couriers, but in an apparent U-turn it reclassified the bulk of them as independent contractors, cutting 1,700 delivery jobs in an effort to reduce expenses.
Groen's principled stance on employment couldn't survive the competitive pressures. When your rivals are using gig workers and undercutting your delivery costs, principles become luxuries.
The London Delisting
After completing a review of optimal listing venues, Anglo-Dutch food delivery firm Just Eat Takeaway said it intended to delist from the London Stock Exchange. That would make Amsterdam Just Eat Takeaway's sole trading venue. Dec. 24 marked the last date of trading of Just Eat Takeaway's shares on the LSE. Just Eat Takeaway said it was delisting its shares from the London Stock Exchange due to the "low liquidity and trading volumes" of its shares on the exchange.
Just Eat Takeaway said it was delisting its shares from the LSE in a bid to "reduce the administrative burden, complexity and costs associated with the disclosure and regulatory requirements of maintaining the LSE listing."
Just Eat's London debut in 2014, valued at ÂŁ1.5bn, was a milestone for the UK's tech sector, marking the largest tech IPO in eight years. However, subsequent mergers with Takeaway.com in 2020 and U.S.-based Grubhub left the company managing multiple listings. Initially, Just Eat had planned to prioritize its London listing over Amsterdam but later reversed course.
IX. The Prosus Acquisition: Full Circle (2025)
The Return of an Old Suitor
Prosus, which holds stakes in German food delivery firm Delivery Hero (28%), Chinese shopping platform Meituan (4%), and Indian grocery delivery service Swiggy (25%), has long pursued Just Eat. In 2019, it attempted a hostile €6.1 billion bid for Just Eat before the company merged with Dutch competitor Takeaway.com.
Six years after its failed hostile bid, Prosus finally got its target—but at a fraction of what it would have paid in 2019, and with the American headache already excised.
Prosus intends to acquire Just Eat Takeaway.com's entire issued share capital for €20.30 per share via a recommended all-cash public offer on the Amsterdam exchange. This represents a 49% premium to the 3-month VWAP as of 21 February 2025, and a 22% premium to Just Eat Takeaway.com's highest share price over the last three months.
The offer was unanimously recommended by Just Eat Takeaway.com's management board and supervisory board. The Just Eat Takeaway.com board members holding shares, including Just Eat Takeaway.com's CEO Jitse Groen, committed to tender their Shares in the Offer.
The Strategic Logic for Prosus
As a leading global food delivery investor and operator, with a proven track record in successfully scaling ecommerce platforms, Prosus is well positioned to invest in and accelerate growth at Just Eat Takeaway.com. Prosus's highly effective growth strategy at iFood, in Brazil, provides a ready guide to transform Just Eat Takeaway.com's growth path through renewed focus across tech, product features, demand generation, offer quality and service. In particular, Prosus's AI capabilities have been fundamental to the success of iFood. The implementation of AI has revolutionised operations at iFood and enhanced the customer experience and support for drivers, making it the most loved brand in Brazil. Similar opportunities exist at Just Eat Takeaway.com.
Fabricio Bloisi, CEO of Prosus said: "Europe is at a pivotal moment to create a new generation of AI-powered tech champions, and this transaction is a unique opportunity to lead that transformation. With Prosus's strong technical and investment capabilities, combined with JET's leading brand position in key European markets, I'm confident this deal will create tremendous value."
The Founder's Exit
"Just Eat Takeaway.com is now a faster growing, more profitable and predominantly European-based business," founder and CEO Jitse Groen said. "Prosus fully supports our strategic plans, and its extensive resources will help to further accelerate our investments and growth across food, groceries, FinTech and other adjacencies."
The current members of the management board of Just Eat Takeaway.com will continue after Settlement.
Groen, who started the company as a 21-year-old student, will continue leading the business under Prosus ownership. The company he bootstrapped for twelve years, took public, and built into a European champion will now operate as a subsidiary of a South African tech giant.
X. Lessons and Analysis: What Went Wrong (and Right)
The Bull Case That Was
The story of Just Eat Takeaway contained all the elements of a classic compounder: a founder-led company with skin in the game, dominant positions in attractive markets, a capital-light business model, and strong network effects. In 2020, the thesis seemed unassailable.
But the bull case rested on several assumptions that proved false:
Assumption 1: "Winner Takes Most" in Each Market The theory was that food delivery markets would consolidate to one or two dominant players, with the winner capturing the majority of value. This happened in some markets—Lieferando in Germany, Thuisbezorgd.nl in the Netherlands—but not universally. In the UK, Just Eat faced persistent competition from Deliveroo and Uber Eats. In the US, DoorDash's dominance was already established before Grubhub was acquired.
Assumption 2: The Aggregator Model Scales Indefinitely Just Eat's original model—letting restaurants handle delivery while the platform takes a commission—worked brilliantly in markets with established takeaway culture. But newer entrants like Deliveroo and Uber Eats offered delivery logistics as a service, enabling restaurants without delivery capabilities to participate. This expanded the total addressable market but also created well-funded competitors.
Assumption 3: Cross-Border Synergies in Food Delivery The Grubhub acquisition assumed that scale across geographies would create synergies. But food delivery is intensely local—consumer preferences, restaurant relationships, and regulatory environments differ dramatically. The skills that made Takeaway.com successful in the Netherlands didn't translate to winning in Chicago.
The Bear Case That Materialized
Realistically, restaurants' traditional profit margins of 7 to 22 percent make covering the platforms' delivery commissions, roughly 15 to 30 percent, unsustainable as delivery orders become a larger part of a restaurant's business.
The fundamental bear case was simpler: food delivery is a bad business. Margins are thin. Switching costs for consumers are low. Restaurants resent commission rates. And the gig economy model that enables flexible delivery creates constant regulatory and reputational risk.
According to a May report by the Financial Times, food delivery platforms had suffered more than $20 billion in losses since going public, with shares in the four largest, publicly-traded American/European delivery apps—DoorDash, Delivery Hero, Just Eat Takeaway and Deliveroo—trading below the peaks they saw during the pandemic.
Porter's Five Forces Analysis
Threat of New Entrants: Medium-High While building a delivery platform requires significant investment, well-capitalized entrants like Uber demonstrated that incumbents could be challenged. The key barrier isn't technology—it's customer acquisition and restaurant relationships.
Bargaining Power of Suppliers (Restaurants): High Restaurants increasingly resent platform commissions and have explored alternatives like direct ordering. Multi-homing is common—most restaurants list on multiple platforms simultaneously.
Bargaining Power of Buyers (Consumers): High Consumers show limited brand loyalty in food delivery. They'll use whichever app offers the best promotion or has their desired restaurant. Switching costs are essentially zero.
Threat of Substitutes: High The ultimate substitute is cooking at home or dining out—both of which rebounded post-pandemic. Restaurant direct delivery apps and ghost kitchens also compete for the same occasions.
Industry Rivalry: Intense With DoorDash, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and numerous local players, competition for both restaurants and consumers remains fierce. Marketing spend and driver subsidies create a race to the bottom.
Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers Framework
Scale Economies: Moderate advantage at the market level, but not globally transferable. Being big in Germany doesn't help you in Chicago.
Network Effects: Present but weaker than expected. More restaurants attract more customers, which attracts more restaurants—but the effect is market-specific and easily contested by competitors willing to subsidize one side of the marketplace.
Counter-Positioning: Just Eat's original asset-light model was counter-positioned against delivery-heavy competitors. But this advantage eroded as Deliveroo and Uber Eats captured restaurants without delivery infrastructure.
Switching Costs: Essentially zero for consumers. Moderate for restaurants who've integrated platform technology.
Branding: Strong in specific markets (Lieferando, Thuisbezorgd.nl) but brands are local, not global. Just Eat brand strength varied dramatically by country.
Cornered Resource: None identified. Technology is easily replicated; restaurant relationships are not exclusive.
Process Power: Not evident. Operational excellence varied by market and wasn't a consistent advantage.
The analysis reveals a troubling picture: food delivery lacks the structural advantages that create durable competitive moats.
XI. Financial Performance: The Numbers Behind the Story
Revenue and Profitability
Net loss for the period amounted to €1,645 million in 2024 versus €1,846 million in 2023 and was mainly driven by non-cash impairment losses of €1,002 million related to Grubhub, which was sold to Wonder for an enterprise value of $650 million.
Adjusted EBITDA improved significantly to €460 million in 2024 from €339 million in 2023, with the largest improvement in UK and Ireland, mainly due to improvement in fulfilment cost per order and efficiencies in marketing. Free cash flow before changes in working capital for the Group improved to €104 million in 2024 from minus €52 million in 2023.
Just Eat Takeaway generated €3.1 billion revenue in 2023, a 6.2% increase year-on-year. Just Eat Takeaway reported a €1.8 billion loss in 2023, an improvement on the €5.7 billion loss it reported the previous year.
Key Performance Indicators
Just Eat Takeaway reported €17 billion in gross merchandise value in 2023. Just Eat Takeaway completed 643 million orders in 2023, a 2.3% decline on the year prior. Just Eat Takeaway has 374,000 partnered restaurants across all of their platforms.
Regional Performance
In UK and Ireland, GTV increased by 4% at constant currency in 2024 compared with 2023. The simplification of delivery operations, enhanced algorithms and further optimisations in order pooling led to a lower delivery cost per order. Consequently, adjusted EBITDA improved by 62% to €219 million in 2024, up from €135 million in 2023. The adjusted EBITDA margin rose to 3.1% in 2024 from 2.0% in 2023.
Revenue grew by 7% year-on-year in Northern Europe, fuelled by GTV growth and a higher contribution from advertising revenue. Adjusted EBITDA increased slightly by €5 million to €371 million in 2024 compared with €366 million in 2023.
XII. Key Metrics for Investors to Track
For those monitoring the food delivery industry, three KPIs matter most:
1. Gross Transaction Value (GTV) Growth
GTV represents the total value of orders processed through the platform—the clearest indicator of marketplace health. Flat or declining GTV suggests market saturation or competitive pressure. For Just Eat Takeaway, excluding North America, GTV growth of 2-6% indicated a maturing business.
2. Adjusted EBITDA Margin as % of GTV
This measures operational efficiency and path to profitability. Just Eat Takeaway targeted a long-term margin in excess of 5% of GTV. Reaching this target requires disciplined cost management and pricing power.
3. Orders Per Active Consumer
This metric reveals customer engagement and retention. Increasing orders per consumer suggests habit formation and reduced customer acquisition costs over time.
XIII. The Road Ahead Under Prosus
In 2024, we achieved significant milestones. We advanced our products, further expanded our partner base, particularly in verticals like grocery, electronics, and pharmacy, and made strategic portfolio decisions that position the company well for long-term success. Following the sale of our US operations, Just Eat Takeaway.com has become a more focused, faster growing, and more profitable business. Our ambition for 2025 is to further accelerate our topline growth through a step up in investments in Europe and UK and Ireland.
Fabricio Bloisi, Prosus's CEO said, "I'm very pleased with the outcome of the tender offer, and excited to welcome JET to the Prosus ecosystem. JET has a solid foundation, but for Prosus the hard work starts now. Our goal is to act quickly to transform JET through a focus on product, customer and innovation, creating a true European tech champion that will reshape the future of food delivery."
Just Eat Takeaway.com will continue to be based in Amsterdam under its existing name and will maintain its key brands.
The question now is whether Prosus can execute the transformation it promises. The company points to its success with iFood in Brazil as a template. But Europe is not Brazil—it's a patchwork of different markets, regulations, and consumer behaviors.
XIV. Conclusion: What the Just Eat Takeaway Story Teaches Us
The saga of Just Eat Takeaway.com offers several enduring lessons for investors and entrepreneurs:
Timing Matters, But Persistence Matters More: Jitse Groen launched his platform years before the market was ready. His willingness to bootstrap for twelve years while waiting for broadband adoption proved critical. Too many founders give up when the market doesn't materialize on their timeline.
Discipline in M&A Can Evaporate Under Pressure: The same company that rationally swapped UK operations for Benelux operations with Just Eat in 2016 would, four years later, pay $7.3 billion for a distant third-place player in the world's most competitive market. The pandemic created an environment where caution seemed like cowardice.
Network Effects Aren't Universal: Just because a business has some network effects doesn't mean it has durable competitive advantages. Food delivery's network effects proved weaker than expected, especially when well-capitalized competitors were willing to subsidize both sides of the marketplace.
Geography Matters in Platform Businesses: Success in one market doesn't guarantee success in another. Food delivery is intensely local—what works in Amsterdam may not work in Chicago.
Founder Vision Can Become Founder Hubris: Groen's ambition to create "the world's largest food delivery business outside China" led to the Grubhub acquisition. Sometimes the best strategy is to dominate fewer markets rather than compete weakly in many.
The story ends where it began—with a Dutch company, now under South African ownership, focused on European markets. The sale frees Just Eat Takeaway to concentrate on its core markets of Britain, Ireland and Northern Europe.
From a dorm room in Enschede to a €20 billion pandemic peak to a €4.1 billion Prosus acquisition, Just Eat Takeaway.com's journey encapsulates the promise and peril of platform businesses. The company transformed how millions of Europeans order food. It also destroyed billions in shareholder value through a single ill-timed acquisition.
The platforms remain. The restaurants still list their menus. Customers still order their pizza. But the dream of a global food delivery champion has given way to something more modest: a European business, under new ownership, trying to find profitability in a brutally competitive industry.
That may not be the ending Jitse Groen imagined when he couldn't order takeaway for his family's birthday party in North Holland. But it's the ending the market delivered.
Material Risks and Regulatory Considerations: - Ongoing regulatory scrutiny of gig economy worker classification across European markets - Competition law concerns given Prosus's stakes in Delivery Hero, Swiggy, and Meituan - Potential for further market exits if profitability targets aren't met - Currency exposure given operations across multiple European markets - Restaurant commission rates face ongoing pressure from restaurant advocacy groups
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