Food-Delivery Services

Feeling peckish but don’t want to go out? David Crookes thinks you should get stuffed from one of the growing number of online food-delivery services.

What’s the deal?

In days gone by, ordering a takeaway entailed hunting for paper menus stuffed in drawers, making a phone call and hoping the person on the other end managed to write down your order and home address correctly. It also meant having a wallet bursting with cash for when the driver arrived. Today the situation is different. You can now order meals from thousands of restaurants entirely online, even if they don’t have their own delivery drivers.

Is there a big appetite for this?

There is. Companies such as Just Eat (www.just-eat.co.uk) and Hungry House (hungryhouse.co.uk) have been acting as intermediaries for a number of years, providing an online ordering service for restaurants and takeaways but leaving the deliveries to the food outlets themselves. But over the past year or so, there has been a noticeable increase in online food-delivery services that use their own drivers. Promising to take you from hunger to a full belly faster than you can say “pepperoni 12 in deep pan with extra cheese”, they have greatly expanded the number of eateries that deliver to your home.

Which companies are involved?