Best Food Delivery Apps in the UK 2023
You came back from work after a long, tiring day. You dream of the meal you will prepare to reward yourself because of your achievement at work. It’s almost 9 PM, you open the fridge and see that you have insufficient ingredients to prepare dinner. Going back to the street for grocery shopping doesn’t seem like an option. You take out your smartphone to order from your favourite restaurant using your food delivery app. Of course, this was before the pandemic.
After the Dawn of Pandemic Comes the Reign of Delivery Apps
Food delivery apps have always been a fantastic option if you have no time to go to buy groceries, cook, or just feel a little lazy to do neither. Even though the food delivery app market has been growing consistently since 2015, the correlation between the COVID-19 pandemic and the increase in the users and revenue in the market can’t be deniable. According to businessofapps.com’s data, the users of food delivery apps increase between 1 million to 2 million on average, but from 2019 to 2020, this number went up to almost 5 million in the UK.
The UK’s residents benefited from the services of food and grocery delivery apps, thanks to the devoted couriers and creative entrepreneurs.
Without further ado, let’s get to our list of the best food delivery apps in the UK.
Best Food Delivery Apps List
Just Eat
Just Eat was one of the favourite delivery apps of Londoners since 2008. The veteran delivery app Just Eat was originally founded in Denmark, 2001 by Jesper Buch, Laurens Groenendijk, Marc Wesselink, Martijn Rozendaal, and Per Meldgaard. Now, the company operates in four continents and has almost 40,000 restaurants in its network. More than 12,000 of them are in the UK.
Just Eat became one of the UK’s unicorn companies after it moved its headquarter to London in 2008; raised more than £70M in funding rounds since its foundation. The most significant fund was around £35M ($50M), invested by iFood in June 2015 at a Series E funding round.
Deliveroo
Another UK unicorn, Deliveroo raised about £1.2M of funds at various funding rounds. Greg Orlowski and William Shu founded the company in 2013, and it managed to achieve an average of 650% growth each year since its foundation. Deliveroo’s growth didn’t benefit only itself, the revenue of partner restaurants also increased up to %30 while creating thousands of jobs for locals.
We can say that thinking of Deliveroo as just a delivery app is a little narrow-sighted. It’s a technology company that runs an algorithm called “Frank” that helped cutting delivery time by 20% which allowed couriers to earn more, restaurants to increase their sales, and -obviously- customers to get their foods faster.
Foodhub
Foodhub is a UK only food delivery startup from Stoke-On-Trent and founded by Adi Mula and Mohammed Shakil. It partners mostly with local restaurants. So, if you want to support your local small businesses Foodhub can help you with that. One of the advantages of Foodhub is that there are no commissions charged to partner restaurants. That’s why you can get your food delivered at a cheaper rate sometimes without any additional discounts.
Co-founder Adi Mula started his first business when he was in his second year at college. Then he “decided to focus specifically on continuing to grow the business” and left college. The risk eventually paid off and now he and Mohammed Shakil’s business have more than 15,000 partner restaurant in their networks across the UK.
Uber Eats
Uber Eats is one of the largest food delivery apps around the globe, serving customers in 45 countries and more than 6,000 cities. It has over 600,000 partners. Uber Eats was founded in 2014 as a sub-company of the rideshare app Uber, and it expanded to the UK in 2016. Residents in more than 60 towns across the country enjoy Uber Eats’ delivery service.
According to data by YouGov, Uber Eats is the 91st most popular digital service in Great Britain, of which 51% of Millenials and 41% of women have a positive opinion.
One Delivery
Leeds-based One Delivery operates in 65 cities in the UK. Although it’s not widely known and operational in London, you can order from your favourite restaurants and franchises such as KFC, McDonald’s, and Burger King in some major cities. Craig Pollock founded One Delivery in March 2013 with the vision of becoming one of the major food delivery competitors in the UK. Maybe it didn’t become as big as Just Eat or Deliveroo; it certainly is a niché alternative to the larger businesses.
Scoffable
Daniel Jones and Michael Brown, Founders of Scoffable, won Most Visionary Young Business in Scotland at the BT Scotland Young Entrepreneurs Awards in 2012. It depends on where you live to use the services Scoffable provide. They only operate and are very popular in Scotland, so you cannot find any restaurants around you that partnered with Scoffable if you live in other parts of the UK.
Even though Scoffable focuses mostly on Scotland, it can’t stop you from enjoying their Scottish style of humour on their social media channels. Check this YouTube video for which they partnered with Scottish comedians Gary Faulds, Pretty Blunt, and Darren Dowling (a.k.a. Daza).
SUPPER London
SUPPER London is probably the most niché delivery app in the UK. As the name suggests, it is only operational and partners with restaurants in London. It is a classy alternative to the likes of Uber Eats, Just Eat, and Deliveroo if you live in areas SUPPER London serves.
Another feature that makes SUPPER London interesting is their partnership with innovative GPS startup what3words.
FAQs
How to start a food delivery app?
The development of an app in any sector requires research and ideas. We tried to summarise starting a food delivery app for you.
If you need help outside help in development try to choose an agency that specializes in developing delivery applications and that has a track record working with IT companies.
- Come up with an innovative food delivery app idea.
- Choose your food delivery model.
- Make sure the app will cover 3 user interfaces: Customer, admin, and delivery person.
- Decide on the features your app will have.
- Design UI / UX of the app.
- Choose a development partner if you are not familiar with this process and determine the related costs.
What food delivery app makes the most money?
According to the statistics of 2021, Just Eat Takeaway dominated the UK’s food delivery market with a market share of 45%. UberEats has a share of 27%, followed by Deliveroo with 26%.
How to partner with a food delivery app?
First, you need to choose a third-party platform that is most suitable to your restaurant’s needs. While doing this, you may pay attention to the fees, to the area covered, the consumer size, capacity, and customer service ratings of delivery service. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand if the area your restaurant would like to cover is also serviced well by the delivery app you’re planning to work with. Once you choose the most convenient app, you will need to understand the app’s order placing is working smoothly with your restaurant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and create your menu on the delivery app. Sometimes, restaurants also do these last integrations with the help of a third-party company.
