Investigating the Wild World of Cardiff Deliveroo
or, how 21% of Cardiff's delivery options aren't 'real' restaurants.
I’ve never really been one for takeaways. I enjoy cooking at home, but if I want to eat a restaurant’s food, I’d much rather just go and sit down and eat there. Tasting their hard work after it’s been packaged and shipped across town, upon which it arrives at my doorstep tepid at best, isn’t an ideal eating experience.
That’s not even mentioning the price markups and the cut the monopolised services take from restaurants on already razor thin margins.1
But sometimes takeaways are unavoidable; after a long day of work, or just through sheer lack of energy. Despite my general avoidance of them, I’ve still ordered hundreds of takeaways in the last few years, especially on the back of the pandemic. It’s not just me either, as services like Deliveroo reported growth of nearly 100%.
Regardless, I like to think I know a reasonable amount about food in the city. In most cases, if you can name a restaurant, I at least know of its existence, if I haven’t eaten there already.
So, after browsing Deliveroo to order something for a stay-at-home team bonding lunch, I was certainly surprised to be greeted with a host of restaurant listings I had never heard of.
In most cases, I’d put it down to me just being increasingly out of touch. But something wasn’t adding up.
Who are these restaurants? Where have they come from? Has my recent employment in London made me live under a rock? I took it upon myself to find out.
Part 1: Dig (data-scrape) for Victory
The first clue to unravelling this enigma came via the listings on Deliveroo itself. Under the additional information, a search for familiar addresses bore the opening thread that could lead to the untangling — food hygiene ratings.
To begin, I inspected ‘Mac Shack’. A two-second search for any details that may give away this pasta-focused brand are quickly revealed by the linked food hygiene database.
It’s…Bella Italia’s account.
But apparently they clearly advertise that it’s a Bella Italia offshoot in other cities. Maybe it’s just Cardiff being the weird one here.
However, the more listings of the unfamiliar restaurants I scanned, I found nearly every single one were registered to high-street restaurants, most of which were large national chains.
I needed to keep digging, but I knew I couldn’t do it manually. Cardiff isn’t that big, but the list was endless, and I needed some help from technology.
Thus, with a little know-how, I was soon in the possession of a Python script, ready to data scrape the entirety of Cardiff’s Deliveroo offerings at the press of a button.2
Within this newly collected data, I had access to the name of every restaurant listing, their rating, what food they serve, and, most importantly, their registered address.
And, with a little sorting, it was then very easy to spot which restaurants were doubling up, or in a few cases, quadrupling or even quintupling up.
A few of these were immediately obvious as to their source. It doesn’t take much imagination to Sherlock Holmes your way around deducing who out the culprit behind ‘Melts by Café Rouge,’ and ‘Le Burger by Café Rouge’ is.3
Some are also somewhat founded in the mainstream conscience. I didn’t think Coco Di Mama existed as a high street restaurant before examining these listings. But after spotting locations in London while travelling to work, a short Google then revealed the Italian fast food brand was bought by Zizzi in 2015.
If you were Zizzi and had access to an established brand name and could recreate the dishes without too many extra resources, why wouldn’t you?
One sleeper business that caught me by surprise was Frankie & Benny’s. This long-existing chain, who looks to be suffering from an identity crisis, operates online as ‘Devonly Pies,’ ‘Bird Box,’ ‘BONE JAM,’ ‘STACKS’ and ‘Puddo’ at the same time.
After highlighting the repeat offenders, it was then a case of counting how many of them there were in total.
21% of ‘restaurant’ listings in Cardiff were entirely virtual.
Let’s delve into that number in a little more detail:
Part 2: The soft-relaunch?
Doing some reading around the subject offers a first potential explanation. For many businesses, these virtual-only brands may offer a new breath of life and distance from their name and existing reputation.
For brands who may feel as though their existing mainstream reputation is too harsh, it offers the opportunity of a full rebrand without the financial risk.
That’s not to say launching these virtual brands is completely free — most brands will choose to buy packaging, stickers, and other basics to match their new name. However, the costs of these are in a completely different ballpark to opening a new sit-down venue.
In the world of delivery services, these reputations are effectively quantified via a rating system, whether purely numerical or by number of stars.
You’d also think that with access to the scraped data of every restaurants’ ratings, it would shed some light on the situation.
If the rating of the high-street restaurant’s delivery service was very different to that of it’s virtual counterpart, that would prove the hypothesis of restaurants using the virtual listings like they’re soft-launching their new beaus on Instagram.
This doesn’t appear to be the case.
Once calculated, the average difference in rating between each of the virtual brands is just 0.3 points, with most listings sitting only 0.1 to 0.2 apart from eachother.
The largest difference in rating is that of Pizza Chick, who operates five virtual brands out of its Grangetown premises. While its Deliveroo listing with the same name as the shopfront sits at 3.9, as ‘Brooklyn Calzones’ and ‘Killer Wings,’ it’s rated at just 2.8 and 1.4, respectively.
So why bother launching these brands? One would assume that it is easier to have just one takeaway operation, especially if the original is rated highest of them all.
Maybe each restaurants offerings might provide an answer.
Part 3: Same ingredients, different menu
For a few of the over 100 virtual-only listings in the Welsh capital, there’s a common thread among a few of the smaller restaurants who choose to do this. Aside from effectively relaunching for PR purposes, perhaps restaurants are using these virtual-only brands as a way to expand and ringfence the different cuisines they offer.
For many of the smaller, ‘traditional’ takeaways — kebab shops that also sell pizza, fried chicken, etc — it can make sense.4 If you sell multiple food groups, separating your offerings helps. Thus, when people search directly for ‘fried chicken,’ you’re pushed directly up the SEO ladder.5
However, for the larger chains, this theory quickly falls apart at the seams. For many of the larger brands, the menus across their numerous virtual offerings are strikingly similar, if not totally identical.
Further yet, despite their menus being unchanged across the brands, aside from a small sticker on a thumbnail, what’s more bizarre is that the prices for identical items are different, too.
National chain Barburrito is listed under its own name on Deliveroo, but also operates as ‘Death Valley Burritos’ and ‘Twisted Health Kitchen’ online. Under the latter, it offers ‘protein bowls’ and ‘veggie fit boxes,’ among other health-oriented items. While they may at first sound totally different to the world of burritos, a quick look at the bowls and you’ll see they’re the effectively the same ingredients that go into its wrapped counterparts, minus the tortilla.
Given burritos aren’t necessarily known for being the healthiest of food groups, perhaps this online rebrand is primarily used for easy access to a new market without having to adjust its core menu.
There’s nothing wrong with that; if anything, it’s smart business practice. For a small amount of effort into what is effectively culinary spin, you’ve taken the same product and repackaged into something that fills a gap in the market. If it worked for Dasani — at least for a while — it can work here too, right?
It also appears to be successful, as the ‘health’ brand is actually rated higher than the high street name on the platform.
However, Twisted Health Kitchen also sell burritos.
Better yet, you can customise its ‘Super Twisted Burrito,’ and alter the ingredients to make it identical to Barburrito’s ‘Loaded Burrito.’
Even with a random £1 promotional discount, when made to the same specification with the same ingredients, out of the same kitchen, the health version ends up £1 more expensive.
It’s a similar story with other brands — Welsh burger chain The Grazing Shed have two locations in Cardiff City Centre, but operate 4 different brands on Deliveroo out of each location. The first under the brand’s high street name, as well as ‘Friend Fries,’ ‘Karma Burger,’ and ‘Burger Goddess.’
From Grazing Shed, you can order a ‘John Wayne,’ which comes with cheese, smoky bacon, BBQ sauce, Cajun mayonnaise, red onion confit, ketchup and lettuce, for £10.65.
From Burger Goddess, you can order a ‘Hero Burger,’ which comes with cheese, smoky bacon, BBQ sauce, Cajun mayonnaise, red onion confit, ketchup and lettuce, for £16.17.
Needless to say, it takes a fair bit of mental gymnastics to work out how the exact same burger is £6 more expensive.
In defence of Grazing Shed, only its main business is accepting orders on Deliveroo right now, with Burger Goddess, Karma Burger, and Friend Fries all sitting dormant.
It seems to be the case for a few of these clone businesses — perhaps they’re all dead now and the discrepancy has been resolved. Hooray!
Except they aren’t.
Just a short hop onto UberEATs shows a fully functioning Burger Goddess page, accepting orders for ‘Hero Burgers’ for the same price of £16.17.
At one point, I had thought that perhaps these brands were a clever way of circumventing any platform-exclusivity arrangements.6 But given Grazing Shed is also on UberEATs, where it’s selling the John Wayne burger for the same price as listed on Deliveroo, that quickly disproves itself.
However, among the many virtual-only listings there’s also another force at play in Cardiff, away from the high-street restaurants.
Part 4: Dancing in the dark
While examining the extensive list of data, one cluster also clearly stuck out.
In recent years, especially since the start of the pandemic, you may have seen the rise of something called ‘dark kitchens.’ These businesses aren’t really as spooky as they sound, but are effectively takeaway-only businesses that have never existed with a visible storefront.
They’re often managed out of sites catered specifically for virtual-only or pop-up brands, utilised by celebrity-backed ventures looking to franchise out without the overheads of a sit down restaurant.7
These mostly exist in bigger cities, and I didn’t think that Cardiff had any. Turns out, it does.
At 109 Albany Road, there appears to be a dark kitchen quietly working away. I’ve passed it many times in person, adorned with the ‘iFeed’ signage, after taking over from the well-liked Da Ling Kitchen.
Beyond the iFeed doors are 11 separate businesses, all of which appear to operating individually.
While I am slightly perplexed by the existence of other virtual brands only on delivery services, the presence of dark kitchens is one that does actually make sense. Given the growth of the takeaway sector, you don’t always need, or want, the hassle of a sit-down restaurant or storefront.
Especially if you’re a newer business that has taken the world of social media storm or you need a step up from working in your own kitchen,8 these places can offer a great purpose-built space for your business to expand.
Where do we go now?
After explaining these virtual-only brands to a friend and my findings within Cardiff, he asked: “Do you take issue with it?” I don’t really.
So what is there really to make of this? Is there even a point to this? To be very clear,9 none of these restaurants have done anything illegal. It’s not even immoral, really.
So what is it? Have I just spent many hours investigating a subject that doesn’t really need covering?
After trying for weeks to understand the theory behind this strange modern conundrum, I kept circling back to the intention behind these virtual-only brands — creativity.
London burger specialists Patty & Bun was one of the first to dive head first into the virtual-only brand launches. In the process, it spawned ‘Sidechick’ — a distinct move away from burgers into the world of roast chicken, offered in three different flavours. All orders were to be created out of Patty & Bun’s central prep kitchen.
Speaking to BigHospitality last year, owner Joe Grossman shed some light on its rationale from a business perspective:
“We already had the infrastructure in place to deal with the orders and delivery, and doing so gave us the opportunity to further support our suppliers. From a business point of view, going virtual made perfect sense.”
Perhaps this is the key point. For most businesses, the rise of virtual-only branding has been an objectively good thing.
For those who seek to innovate, the opportunity to soft-launch concepts allows them to effectively field entirely new ideas that are wildly distant from their existing operation, without going all in and potentially placing the existing business in jeopardy.
For smaller businesses who may need the extra traffic and SEO boost, this is also probably working for them. It’s hard to know for sure without any hard data.
However, as the above analysis shows, for the majority of those utilising the ability to have as many brands as desired on delivery services, it isn’t really being used that way.
What was once an area for businesses to test new ideas and take more culinary risks without as harsh financial repercussions, has instead resulted in high-street chains flooding and saturating the market, offering identical food across multiple brands at different price points.
In reality, everyone except the big businesses are losers here.
For the innocent customer slapping “burger” into the Deliveroo’s search bar at the end of the day, it might first seem like an advantage to have a brand with the foodstuff in the name immediately at their disposal.
However, in actual fact, they’re being met with homogenised offerings from the same four kitchens under different pseudonyms.
For the smaller businesses hoping to expand their reach to new audience who might otherwise not be able to find them, they’re being buried under by national-scale businesses who can afford to dedicate time and resources into marketing to make sure they’re the only one being seen.
So what can be done about it?
It is highly unlikely that Deliveroo, UberEATs, or any major delivery platform will seek to pursue any policy change to prevent businesses embracing as many split personalities as their hearts’ desire. For them, more listings means more money — it doesn’t matter whose food is selling the most on their platforms, only that they’re selling a lot of it.
For the businesses in Cardiff who are using the platforms to sell identical food at different price points for no justifiable reason outside of the reason that they simply can, I hope this is a practice that will soon fade away.
For consumers, there is little that can be done aside from actively seek out the restaurants most in need of business right now.
There has arguably never been a more difficult time for hospitality. When businesses are faced with staff isolation, ever-increasing import costs, rising gas prices, and cooking oil being more expensive that diesel, it’s smaller businesses that are being disproportionately affected.
The last thing any small business just trying to climb their way up the ladder needs is the biggest businesses — who can afford to weather out the storm — squashing any chance of them being seen or discovered.
I’m almost certain this isn’t a Cardiff-only phenomenon, either. Given this is being practiced by mostly national chains, if you were to perform the same investigation on another city in the UK where food delivery platforms have its populace in a chokehold, you’ll likely come to the same, if not very similar, conclusion.
Thus, any examples I’ve highlighted within this article weren’t done so out of spite, personal vendetta, or calling for their cancellation. I’ve ordered and enjoyed many Grazing Shed burgers in my time, as I have annihilated burritos.
It would be severely out of touch to add even more issues onto the above-described dumpster fire. But as a consumer, I can suggest a few things.
Be mindful of where you order from — check under additional information to see whether they’re trading under their high street name and order accordingly.
Order directly from the restaurant’s website if possible — this will cut out the middle man and the high commission rate taken by most food delivery services.
Check if restaurants are listed on alternative, ethical delivery platforms — in Cardiff, Indie Eats has proved that delivery platforms can work alongside restaurants, paying riders fairly without also taking a 30% commission. It’s a similar story in other cities, too, such as BARBI in Bristol.
Avoid delivery platforms altogether and go and sit down in a restaurant, if you can.10
Happy ordering!
When restaurants have been at their knees for the last two years, it doesn’t feel fair that platforms like Deliveroo and UberEATs can reportedly take a 30% cut of profits.
I will save you the boredom of explaining the script, or the endless Excel formatting that followed.
The fact there is still a business in 2022 who thought though simple adding a ‘le’ to the front of a word makes it French is le estounding.
I use 'traditional’ very loosely here — I’m mostly talking about the joyful and lively places one experiences on Caroline Street after a few too many drinks. (and yes, I will be avoiding the Chippy Alley/Lane semantic civil war)
Where SEO = Searchable Eating Options.
Unfortunately, there is little way to definitively prove this as these deals are private business and never really made public.
My favourite name celebrity branded business is unquestionably from DJ Khaled, with his ‘Another Wing.’
(and to avoid any potential hints of defamation)
I understand for some people this is simply not possible, for medical reasons or otherwise, and the piece has not been made to pass judgement on those who may rely on them.