The CEO of Winnipeg-based SkipTheDishes has announced the food delivery tech firm and its parent company, JustEat Takeaway.com, is laying off hundreds of workers in Canada following a “comprehensive review” that has led to a restructuring of the business.
SkipTheDishes CEO Paul Burns shared the news in a LinkedIn post this week, saying that layoffs will affect approximately 100 Skip employees and 700 Canada-based employees of JustEat Takeaway. Burns said that the cuts were “necessary to ensure we have the right resources and organizational structure in place to drive sustainable growth.”
“These decisions were not made based on the quality of their work or the contributions they have made to our business, brand, and culture, but on how closely roles map to our future vision,” Burns added.
SkipTheDishes is coming off a tumultuous 2023 that saw three people take on the company’s CEO role, starting with the replacement of Howard Midgal in March 2023, who departed to lead JustEat’s Grubhub subsidiary after just five months as the head of SkipTheDishes. Midgal’s successor, Steve Puchala, retired after just nine months on the job, leading to the external hire of Burns in December 2023. Burns previously acted as the managing director of Twitter Canada.
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SkipTheDishes was founded in 2012 in Saskatoon, but has long had its headquarters in Winnipeg. The company was acquired by United Kingdom-based Just Eat in 2016 for $110 million, before being merged into Dutch food delivery company Takeaway.com in 2020.
SkipTheDishes’s last wave of layoffs in 2022 also followed a “comprehensive review” at JustEat Takeaway, and affected 350 employees.
After pandemic-fuelled growth, the four largest food delivery companies in the United States and Europe,—Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway, Delivery Hero and DoorDash—have taken more than $20 billion USD in combined operating losses since they publicly listed, the Financial Times reported earlier this year.
Feature image courtesy SkipTheDishes.
