After looking for a buyer for more than two years, Just Eat Takeaway.com has finally closed the menu on Grubhub. On Tuesday, the Dutch food delivery giant said it completed the sale of the U.S. business to Wonder, the food startup founded and led by e-commerce veteran Marc Lore. The deal has an enterprise value of $650 million, but Grubhub is coming laden with $500 million of debt. Adding in other M&A fees, Just Eat Takeaway will be walking away with a mere $50 million, a small fraction of the $7.3 billion valuation that Grubhub had when Just Eat Takeaway gobbled it up in an all-share deal in 2020.
The sale, which was first announced in November 2024, underscores the ongoing downsizing — or right-sizing? — in the industry to focus more on profitability after years of overinvestment and unrealistic growth targets. Just Eat Takeaway says it will turn its focus towards “investment in countries in which it has the greatest competitive advantage.”
In the case of Wonder, Lore is somewhat of a legend in the world of e-commerce, previously founding and selling companies to Amazon and Walmart. Wonder has raised around $1.7 billion and has ambitions to go public in the coming years at a $40 billion valuation, Lore has said, but that will mean that the business has to grow considerably beyond what it is today. Grubhub gives it a national footprint — albeit one that has been operating with heavy debt for some time. The challenge will be whether Wonder manages to finally turn that around.