Just Eat buys City Pantry for £16m: Just Eat, the market place for takeaway food delivery, has acquired City Pantry for initial cash consideration of £16m. The company stated: “City Pantry, founded by Stuart Sunderland in 2014, is Europe’s leading B2B catering market place, linking caterers and restaurants with corporate customers providing food for their employees or clients. The business currently helps feed more than 120,000 people at 1,000 corporate customers every month. It works with hundreds of suppliers, including branded restaurant groups such as Itsu, Leon and Bill’s to provide meals for corporate events or business meetings. City Pantry’s leading position will help Just Eat expand into a UK corporate market estimated to be worth about £10bn a year by leveraging City Pantry’s brand, technology and B2B know-how to provide corporate customers with a wide range of high-quality, reliable food for delivery and restaurant partners with access to pre-scheduled, high-value corporate orders. It also provides the potential to expand further into international markets. The initial cash consideration of £16m was paid using existing resources. Further cash consideration may also be payable subject to certain operational and financial criteria being met over the next three years. The acquisition of City Pantry follows agreements to buy restaurant software groups Practi and Flyt. Peter Duffy, interim chief executive of Just Eat, said: “Working with City Pantry to accelerate its mission to improve and modernise the workplace dining experience is a great opportunity for Just Eat. It’s the right time for us to enter the corporate market and expand our offering. City Pantry has a well-established business, fantastic expertise and an entrepreneurial spirit that matches our own. We look forward to bringing the company into the Just Eat family and working with them to grow in the UK and internationally in this exciting and dynamic market.” Stuart Sunderland, founder and chief executive of City Pantry, added: “What we eat in our personal lives has dramatically changed in the past ten years in terms of quality and choice. The food revolution is now beginning to happen at work and City Pantry is at the forefront of this. We know Just Eat shares our belief and we’ve been impressed with its vision of what we can do together.”