Jitse Groen, the Billionaire Buying Up Food Delivery Apps

The Dutch billionaire has been on a shopping spree in recent years, buying up rivals to build Just Eat into the largest online food delivery operation outside of China. If you’re ordering from Lieferando in Germany, 10bis in Israel, SkipTheDishes in Canada, or Menulog in Australia—any app whose logo features an orange house with a fork and knife inside—you’re ordering from Groen’s company. The Grubhub acquisition, among the largest by a European tech company this year, makes Just Eat the third-biggest player in the U.S. by market share, behind DoorDash Inc. and Uber Eats.

The purchase comes at a tough time for the industry, which is under pressure to improve working conditions and is facing caps set by New York, San Francisco, and other cities on the fees it charges restaurants. Groen, who founded his company in 2000 as a college student before dropping out, has boasted about Just Eat’s initiative to hire couriers as employees with guaranteed wages rather than treat them as independent contractors, as rivals do. But he faces criticism from investors, as Just Eat’s stock price has dropped during the pandemic amid heavy spending by the company to fend off competition. They blame Just Eat for communicating its strategy poorly—for instance, investing in businesses such as grocery delivery that it had previously knocked as unprofitable. One prominent investor has warned that Just Eat could be vulnerable to a takeover and is already calling for a sale or spinoff of Grubhub.