Fears over quality of Just Eat food as 35 restaurants fail on hygiene

FOOD delivery service Just Eat has removed 35 restaurants from its platform after discovering they had not held an official hygiene rating for years.

The move raises concerns that thousands of Just Eat customers have been eating meals prepared in unsafe premises. Just Eat said the restaurants had signed up before 2009, when it first introduced a policy to ensure all takeaways had an official hygiene rating.

The Food Hygiene Rating Scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is compulsory for restaurants and was set up to tell customers about the hygiene standards of food premises. Ratings up to five stars are awarded by local trading standards officers and have to be displayed on company websites or on their shop doors.

Just Eat started an audit of restaurants in 2016 which has so far resulted in the removal of 35 businesses, it said.

One of the affected businesses, in Basildon, Essex, was investigated by the BBC, which found no evidence that it had been used for anything other than a car wash for at least two years.

Just Eat’s website and smartphone app have 10 million customers and take orders on behalf of 28,000 food outlets in the UK, levying a 50p service charge on customers each time. A spokesman at Just Eat said: “We take food safety extremely seriously. Any restaurant wishing to partner with us must be FSA registered with the relevant local authority and provide evidence of this before we put them on our platform.

“We positively incentivise food safety and make numerous resources available to our restaurant partners to support and improve standards in this area, such as dedicated online training and a partnership with NSF, a leading US global food safety consultancy, offering various packages to our partners including having a qualified auditor come into their business to help improve standards.”