Dublin-based food ordering start-up Flipdish announced today (7 April) it has launched a not-for-profit directory of Irish restaurants, as an alternative ordering site to food marketplaces such as JustEat and Deliveroo.

Customers are able order from their local restaurants using the site Straghtfrom.com. The website is available for restaurants and takeaways free of charge, regardless of if they’re a Flipdish customer. The Dublin-headquartered unicorn said the site is available in all markets where Flipdish operates.

The website says food marketplaces are “waging a war” on restaurants, as they seek to “syphon away their customers”.

“Food marketplaces are incentivised to redirect a restaurant’s customers away to whoever will pay most of the order, which has a knock-on effect on the quality of food that can be offered,” the website says on its about page.

Flipdish CEO and co-founder Conor McCarthy said Ireland’s hospitality industry has been badly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and “we want to help support it”.

“We’re proud to work with businesses across the country in making sure they are directly connected to customers,” McCarthy said. “This is why we are backing StraightFrom.com. We want to ensure that customers are aware of all the local food businesses in their area that they can order from.

“We believe this free platform will help those businesses who want to steer away from the high fees attached to listing their businesses on aggregator websites and connect directly with customers,” McCarthy added.

Flipdish customer Nathan Bennett, owner of Dublin’s The Lab restaurant, said one of the problems with food aggregators is that “we have no control over the delivery experience”.

“Since working with Flipdish, we’ve realised that we can still control the whole customer journey from start to finish without that fear that they’re going to get a bad experience from an aggregator,” Bennett said.

Ireland’s food-service unicorn

Flipdish was founded in 2015 by brothers Conor and James McCarthy to help independent eateries take control of their digital business. A major driver behind Flipdish’s growth is restaurant owners bringing their online ordering capability in-house, rather than relying on prominent delivery players.

In an interview with Siliconrepublic.com in 2020, Conor McCarthy said it was hard to get customers to believe in Flipdish at the beginning of its journey. “We were unproven and therefore a risky choice in their eyes, but we were very confident that our product and approach would deliver significant ROI,” he said.

In 2019, the company expanded its product offering to include self-service kiosks and in June 2020 it rolled out a table ordering system for restaurants that were reopening after initial pandemic restrictions.

Flipdish became an Irish unicorn company at the start of this year, when it reached a reaching a $1.25bn valuation following about $100m in investment led by Tencent.

As a result of that investment, Flipdish told SiliconRepublic.com it intends to hire 700 people this year, with a third of these jobs based in Ireland.

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