OnlinePizza

» see onlinepizza.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In the summer of 2005 three students in Linköping put up a website that took pizza orders. It ran under a trading partnership called Adapex, and the pitch fit in one sentence. Instead of calling the place down the street and reading your address out over a bad line, you picked the restaurant off a list and typed.

The thing it actually sold was not software. It was a directory. A pizzeria with no website and no interest in getting one could be reachable from a browser the same week, and the customer got a menu that was legible and a total that was correct before anything left the kitchen. That is unglamorous work and it compounds. By the end there were over 1,400 restaurants signed up across more than 200 Swedish towns, and the catalog had long since stopped being only pizza: kebab and sushi sat in the same list.

On 2 April 2012 the German group Delivery Hero bought OnlinePizza and its subsidiaries for a sum reported above a quarter of a billion kronor. Dagens Nyheter ran it under a headline about the students who became millionaires on pizza, which was accurate. The 2012 accounts show a company of about thirty people turning over 46.8 million kronor.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the founder who bought it back ~

Niklas Östberg co-founded Pizza.nu, which ended up inside the OnlinePizza group, and served as its chairman before leaving in 2011 to start Delivery Hero in Berlin. Less than a year after Delivery Hero opened its doors, one of its first acquisitions was the Swedish company its own co-founder had walked away from.

So the 2012 deal reads as an exit on paper and as something stranger underneath. The buyer knew exactly what the asset was worth because the buyer had helped build it.

~ the funny part ~

OnlinePizza spent years pushing New Year's Day as stora pizzadagen, the big pizza day, on the reasonable grounds that most kitchens in Sweden are closed on 1 January and the ones that are open deliver. It worked. Swedes do eat a lot of pizza on New Year's Day.

On 2 January 2018 Aftonbladet ran a piece pointing out that the tradition readers were participating in had been manufactured by a food delivery company. A marketing department invented a national habit and the habit outlasted the company that invented it.

~ how the name came off ~

On 15 November 2019 Delivery Hero Sverige announced that OnlinePizza and Hungrig.se were being merged into foodora. Samir Bachkami, who ran the Swedish business, said the three brands had all performed well and that running several of them was expensive. The archived homepage still said Onlinepizza on 18 November. By 7 December the page title read foodora.

The domain was never retired. Type onlinepizza.se today and you get a 301 to foodora.se, which is what a brand death looks like when the underlying business is healthy. Nothing breaks and nothing goes dark. A word that meant something to a country for fourteen years just stops being printed on anything.

~ the same buyer, a different country ~

The Turkish version of this company is Yemeksepeti, founded in 2001, and Delivery Hero bought that one too, in May 2015, for 589 million dollars. It was the largest internet acquisition the region had seen. The difference is that the Turkish name stayed on the product, and it is the name I have typed for years while never once typing the Swedish one.

In July 2026 Delivery Hero agreed to sell Yemeksepeti and thirteen other markets to SSW Partners for around 1.4 billion euros, conditional on Uber completing its takeover of the parent. Same owner, two countries, two endings. In Sweden the brand was the thing that got deleted. In Turkey the brand is the thing being sold.

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