Driving convenience through innovation

By Jessica Hall, Chief Product Officer, Just Eat Takeaway.com

We want to fit seamlessly into the lives of our network so we’re always looking at how best to evolve our technology to make using our platform as convenient as possible. For our customers, this means making the ordering journey as easy as possible, whether that’s supporting them to try new foods or find last minute groceries. For our partners, we want to provide them with a consistent end-to-end experience, to help them reach more customers and grow their businesses. Testing brand new innovations is one of the ways we do this. 

In-car ordering:

Following the launch of our first in-car ordering system in the UK in December, we’re ready to move to the next stage, rolling out the experience to more countries across Europe. Customers in Ireland, Spain and Italy can now use text/touch commands to place orders using the in-car screen, with the feature rolling out to Germany and Austria over the coming weeks too. The App is currently available in the Mercedes-Benz In-Car App Store for customers of select car lines including the new CLE , E-Class, C-Class and GLC  with an activated “Entertainment Package Plus”. We’re also working with other major car brands to roll this out further and test similar features. So whether you’re wanting a hot meal to arrive at your destination, waiting for your electric car to charge, or need your groceries to meet you at home to start cooking, everyday convenience is built right into your vehicle.

Group Ordering:

At Just Eat Takeaway.com, we’re all about empowering customers to get what they want, when they need it. Essentially, we’re creating a digital highstreet, so whether you’re looking for pet food or a favourite takeaway, we’ll deliver it to you. To support this vision, we continue to focus on how best to tailor our product. We’ve recently rolled out a Group Ordering feature which provides customers with the ability to create a shared basket and invite friends and family to add items, make edits, with the order initiator having full visibility before checking out and paying. We’ve also enhanced our discovery experience through carousels to make it even easier for customers to find what they’re looking for, whether that be a grocery shop, flowers, or their favourite takeaway. 

Menu AI:

We want to empower our partners’ growth with new customers, new channels and new opportunities. So providing them with a consistent experience is hugely important and we’re always looking at ways to make this even better. To help make the on-boarding experience for our partners even easier, we’ve introduced Menu AI: a tool that is designed to help speed-up the process of onboarding partners by using AI to capture partners’ menus and placing it on our platform. As we move further into grocery and retail, we’re also tailoring our product to suit the needs of these new partners. This includes increasing the number of product lines we can host and for grocery partners specifically, we’ve developed an in-store picking app. This is compatible with the hardware used by our partners to help manage orders from JET more efficiently. It also makes it easier to manage missing items, giving options to substitute. Currently live in the UK, we plan on rolling this out to more markets over the coming months. 

Unifying our platforms: 

To help deliver a consistent experience to our partners and consumers,  we continue to unify our apps and websites across our markets into one single global app platform. We're making great progress and have recently rolled out one app to more markets including Germany, Austria and, most recently, the Netherlands.

By the end of the year, we will have rolled out to the vast majority of the European countries we operate in. Unifying our app platform allows us to streamline operations, reduce costs and enables us to innovate effectively by building and rolling out impactful new product features for our wider consumer and partner base in one go. 

We want to always be ahead of what’s coming next, and to help our customers and partners have the best experience possible. As well as these features and initiatives, we’ll continue to innovate and test new products to drive the future of everyday convenience.