Just Eat Takeaway to lay off more than 1,700 courier employees

Food delivery platform Just Eat Takeaway has announced its plans to cut as many as 1,700 mostly courier jobs in Britain, as it slashes costs in the wake of huge annual losses post-pandemic.

The UK-based food delivery platform had revealed earlier this month that acquisition writedowns, the souring economic climate and rising interest rates have seen orders reduce 10% and sparked a massive loss of about €5.7 billion ($6.1 billion) last year from €1 billion ($1.08 billion) the previous year after a series of strategic missteps including the acquisition of US delivery firm Grubhub and Brazil’s iFood.

The job cut will also affect approximately 170 staff in its UK operations team while some could be redeployed. Just Eat Takeaway also said it will stop employing its own couriers in its UK division and instead will only use self-employed gig economy workers.

This underlines the takeaway delivery firm's shift back away from offering worker status that guarantees minimum pay, sick pay and holiday pay, towards a gig economy model that does not offer the same, similar to rival Deliveroo.

The $4.3 billion food delivery company, which is listed in London and Amsterdam, was created in 2020 after Dutch online service Takeaway.com gobbled up Britain's Just Eat, and the business subsequently boomed on the back of the Covid pandemic-fuelled surge in-home delivery, which has since subsided.