David Buttress – Inch by inch…

Another great ‘World Meeting’ where all the just-eaters get together in one place to talk about work, put the talk into action and of course have a great deal of fun. These get togethers are always one of the highlights of the JE calender.

Here we all are, what a happy bunch.

Just-Eat is now in Asia. For further details check out Klaus our CEO’s blog.

Just-Eat and Hungry Zone announce Business Partnership

Hungry Zone to cater to larger number of food lovers by expanding footprint to other cities

Bangalore, 13^th January: Hungry Zone, India’s leading online food ordering and restaurant table reservation platform, today announced that, Just-Eat, UK’s largest online takeaway ordering service, has acquired a majority shareholding in the company and will invest US$ 5-10 million over the coming years into this Joint Venture. Founded in July 2006 and headquartered in Bangalore, India, Hungry Zone enables its customers to place online home delivery orders with over 650 restaurants serving over 40 different cuisines.

This deal is the first major investment of its kind where European e-commerce has invested in this sector in India. It will provide a strong foundation for the joint venture to expand into all Indian metropolitan cities, starting with Mumbai and Delhi shortly.

Commenting on the deal Ritesh Dwivedy, founder and CEO of Hungry Zone, said, “Just-Eat is the leading global player in online food ordering, so the combining of Just-Eat’s best practices, with our strong local knowledge and technical prowess derived from 4 years of operations in India, will drive growth for many years to come. Our proven business model and 100,000 loyal customers will only grow, and our new partners will be thereby helping us to expand our footprint in other major cities.”

Klaus Randel Nyengaard, Group CEO, Just-Eat said, “The acquisition of a controlling interest in Hungry Zone marks the first step of Just-Eat’s expansion into Asia.  The synergy between the two companies is compelling and we’re very excited to be working with such a strong local team. India has an exotic and rich culinary heritage; thereby catering to the variant foodies requires an innovative company like Hungry Zone to understand their preferences and I’m very impressed with their results to date.”

The Just-Eat Group operates in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Canada and now, India.

A quick message to all our customers to say thanks for making this New Years Day the biggest and best ever, a very happy 2011 to you all.  New years day is the biggest day of the year for takeaway restaurants in terms of how busy they are. A combination of hangovers, staying in and a lovely takeaway treat all combine to make it a perfect storm for takeaway ordering.  I had a lamb madras after we finished work and it tasted great.

We will continue to work hard to make our site and service even better in 2011. We have some really exciting developments coming up (not least a mobile app Yeeehaaaa) in 2011 and this will make ordering your fav local takeaway even easier on Just-Eat.

I have to say I enjoy the X – Factor, it is just good old fashioned entertaining Saturday night TV.  It was brilliant to see Just-Eat.co.uk creeping into the final via the Matt Cardle pizza when the programme went to the usual home town shots with Stacey Soloman (her singing career is going from strength to strength since last years X – Factor)  hosting the ‘hysterically’ excited Colchester crowd.

The story had lots of coverage nationally. Here is a link to the Daily Mirrors coverage as a sample, but to my delight we also made it into The Telegraph.

As a small aside I do love the way they always include the local mayor in these brief skits to the home town of the finalists because they just have no relevance at all to the person or programme. Classic!

Check it out.