Just Eat — the marketplace for online food delivery which IPO’d but which is now under increasing pressure from several avenues, not least Uber and Deliveroo — has decided to add to its ‘quiver of arrows’ by acquiring Practi, a software service that provides independent restaurants and small chains with tablet-based Point of Sale (PoS) and restaurant management systems.
The acquisition cost is an initial £6.7m ($8.7m) with further payments dependent on the business achieving certain commercial milestones.
The hope is that this will strengthen Just Eat’s hold on restaurant partners on its platform, either by deploying new tablets with new restaurants or by incorporating Practi’s software on Just Eat’s Orderpads. By using the Orderpads Just Eat will effectively ‘lock in’ these restaurants because it incorporates both PoS, cash and card payment handling, inventory management, kitchen operation and employee management systems, all within a single software package across multiple devices.