Takeaway Delivery Platforms Just Eat & Hungry.dk in The Battle for Denmark

A major success story for Denmark started in 2001 when Danish food service website Just Eat launched for the first time. 5 years later they expanded to the UK and continued to add one country after another into their network. Today Just Eat operates in 13 countries worldwide and has 40,000 takeaway restaurants under their banner and they generate a revenue of £700 million yearly for the restaurant industry. They’re huge.

But could it be that in all their expansionism and transformation into a mega sized firm they forgot top keep an eye on their own back yard?

Aarhus based Hungry.dk is barely a few years old but they already have quite the impressive network built on the Danish peninsula. After signing over 750 local restaurants they’re perhaps far from being as big as Just Eat (who has 1800 restaurants signed in Denmark alone) but they’re definitely to be taken seriously.

To takeout restaurants on small margins, it’s a numbers game. Consumers are going to flock to these platforms where it’s easy to order and pay for dinner online, but it seems Hungry.dk has been able to grow by competing on the marginal cost to these restaurants.

According to their website, Hungry.dk is the most eager to find the best alternatives to choose from, whether that be a good ol’ pizza, the less traditional home delivery sandwich or casually exotic sushi, all of which you could pay either online or on delivery.

To consumers, the main difference between the two is that Hungry.dk has a bonus system included in orders called “stamps”. In short it means that for every tenth order you make (after which you logically should have 10 stamps) you get a bonus on your next meal. Whether you get the meal for free or just a significant discount depends on the money spent on the previous ten deliveries.

Weirdly enough, this seems to be one big reason why hungry.dk has gained the size it has today. Or perhaps it’s a matter of Danes longing for a change. Just Eat is mostly international these days, so why not jump trains for a company that operates exclusively locally and has a bonus system as well?

In a way, both offer pretty much the exact same thing. Both have a website, both have an application and both offer anything from hamburgers to sushi. One is internationally huge while one is big on a local scale. It seems there’s an ongoing takeout war with both services competing for the same customer base.

Just Eat can probably count on their brand for now, but only time will tell how intense the battle with hungry.dk is going to get. The outcome lingers in the unknown lands of possibilities. We might see acquisitions, we might see bankruptcy or we might see a harmonic co-existence between the two. Who knows.

Hungry.dk was founded by online takeaway industry veteran Morten Larsen together with a group of private investors and executive team Rune Risom (CEO) and Mattias B. Løwe (Sales Director) and Jesper Buch. Morten Larsen acts as Chairman of the Board.