La Nevera Roja

» see laneveraroja.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Iñigo Juantegui and José del Barrio started La Nevera Roja in Madrid in 2011, with a name that translates to the red fridge and a model that was already well understood by then. Sit between a hungry person and a restaurant with no website of its own, then take a cut of the order. By the time it was finished it listed around 7,000 restaurants in more than 600 Spanish towns, with payment online or in cash at the door, and at its best it was taking roughly half of all delivery orders in Madrid and Barcelona.

Rocket Internet bought it in February 2015 and folded it into the Global Online Takeaway Group, the holding structure that also ran foodpanda in Asia and hellofood across South America. Iñigo Amoribieta took over as chief executive and both founders left. Spanish startup exits looked like that in those years, and none of it read as a death while it was happening.

Then Rocket opened the books, and this is the bit that survives retelling. The order volume was real and the growth was real, but a large share of it was being bought with discount coupons that took up to fifty percent off a meal. Rocket cut the coupons. Sales dropped hard, and by February 2016 it was selling the company to Just Eat, bundled into a 125 million euro package alongside PizzaBo in Italy and the hellofood operations in Brazil and Mexico. The Spanish competition regulator waved it through in April even though the two brands together accounted for close to ninety percent of the market, which tells you how small the market was understood to be.

Just Eat Spain swallowed the holding company, Grupo Yamm Comida a Domicilio, at the end of July 2016. The brand lasted two more months after that.

~ the case file ~

~ what the coupons were really buying ~

Every delivery platform of that decade ran on the same subsidy, and most of them knew exactly what they were paying for. A coupon does not buy you a customer, it buys you an order, and the difference only becomes visible the month you stop sending them. Rocket stopped, watched the number fall, and put the company on the market inside a year.

~ the sale, twice ~

Just Eat announced the deal on 5 February 2016 and told the London market the Spanish piece had completed on 1 April. Then came the quiet half: the legal absorption of Grupo Yamm in late July, with the platform still trading under the old name behind an unchanged front page.

Alimarket reported the last step on 27 September 2016. Just Eat Spain's commercial channels would take over the whole of La Nevera Roja's activity from 1 October, and the trade note says it plainly, that La Nevera Roja disappears as an independent brand from that same date. A campaign went out across the web pages and the social accounts to move people over. The archive agrees with the paperwork: the site was still serving its full thirty-one kilobyte homepage on 4 August 2016, and after that there is nothing but redirects.

laneveraroja.com times out today, on every host and every scheme. Resolution fails outright on the .es version.

~ spain's version of a fight that was already over elsewhere ~

Turkey settled this question earlier and settled it locally. Yemeksepeti started in 2001 and became the word people here use for ordering food at all. Delivery Hero valued it at 589 million dollars when it bought the company on 5 May 2015, three months after Rocket paid a reported 80 million euros for the Spanish challenger. One of those two names was worth a fraction of the other and was deleted the next year. The other is still the default here.

The useful thing about a dead delivery brand is how little of it was ever really the brand. The restaurants stayed where they were and the couriers kept the same routes. What ended on 1 October was a logo and a domain, and the orders went through the same kitchens the next day under a different name.

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