Take Eat Easy

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

~ the eulogy ~

The European bicycle-courier war of 2015 and 2016 never came to Turkey, and the reason is boring: restaurant delivery already worked here. Motorbikes had been carrying food around Turkish cities for decades before an app existed, and Yemeksepeti had been taking the orders online since 2001. There was no gap for a venture-funded fleet to fill at a loss. Take Eat Easy died fighting over a market that, from Ankara, looked like a solved problem being resold at a premium.

Adrien Roose and three co-founders launched it in Brussels in the summer of 2013 with an unglamorous premise: good restaurants mostly did not deliver, and the ones that did delivered badly. Take Eat Easy would supply the couriers and the software, take a cut of the bill, and let the kitchen keep cooking. It proved the model in Brussels, opened Paris, raised a first round in April 2015 and a second that August.

The twelve months that followed were the kind of growth a deck is built for. The team went from 10 people to 160, the operation from 2 cities to 20, the restaurant list from 450 to 3,200, and the customer base from 30,000 to 350,000. About a third of those customers became regulars ordering roughly one and a half times a month. On 26 July 2016 Roose posted the numbers publicly, and in the same post said the company was filing for judicial restructuring.

~ the dossier ~

~ the arithmetic ~

Roose laid out the unit economics himself, which almost no failed founder does. Take Eat Easy charged the restaurant a commission of 25 to 30 percent and the customer €2.50 for delivery, which came to about €10 of net revenue per order. Out of that it had to pay the courier.

Everything therefore hung on one number: deliveries per courier per hour. A rider needs to clear about €15 an hour or they stop showing up, so if utilization sits below roughly 1.5 deliveries an hour the contribution margin on every single order is negative. The engineering effort went almost entirely at that number, into automatic dispatch based on learned speeds and prep times, into capacity planning that took the weather as an input, into deep integration with the restaurant's own workflow. It worked. Contribution margin turned positive across the group before the end. It was not positive enough, and not soon enough, to cover fixed costs.

~ one hundred and fourteen ~

The Series C process opened in October 2015 into the worst possible weather. One of Take Eat Easy's own investors had bought a direct competitor and was funding it aggressively; that competitor became Foodora. Deliveroo announced a large round, and then announced a larger one a few weeks after Take Eat Easy started talking to people.

By March 2016 the company had been turned down by 114 funds. It then signed a term sheet with a French state-owned logistics group for €30 million, under an exclusivity agreement, and waited through three months of intensive due diligence before that board rejected the deal and pulled the offer. Eight weeks of parallel attempts at financing and acquisition followed and none of them closed. Rocket Internet sold its stake to Delivery Hero that September, which is the tidiest summary of who won available.

~ who carried the loss ~

About 3,000 couriers were riding for the company when it stopped. In France, where roughly 42 of the 142 employees sat, riders reported never being paid for work done between late June and 26 July: a few hundred euros for the occasional rider, and between €2,000 and €4,000 for people doing it full time. They spent that August discussing a collective legal action.

In Belgium the same couriers were paid in full, because the payments there ran through SMart, a freelance cooperative that stood behind the money. One company, one week, and the difference between being paid and not being paid came down to which intermediary happened to sit in the chain in your country. The French labor case outlasted the company by years: a Paris prosecution over undeclared work was still being postponed in 2022.

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