Why Apple Watch and Apple Pay 'fit well' with Just Eat

'We want to be available to the customer wherever they are, on whatever device they have,' says Just Eat CTO Carlos Morgado

The Apple Watch and Apple Pay both play into Just Eat's ethos of being "available to the customer wherever they might be on whatever device they have on their person", which is why the online takeaway firm has actively attempted to cater for the latest technology.

That's what Carlos Morgado, group chief technology officer at Just Eat, told Computing at Open Mobile Summit in London this week.

Apple released its watch in April. Just Eat released a specifically designed app to coincide with the device's launch. Morgado explained how the Apple Watch fits very well with the way Just Eat wants to interact with its customers.

"If you think about a wearable device, it's always on your wrist and plays strongly into the takeaway ordering experience," he told Computing.

"It's a device that is able to interact with you continuously, to tell you about the status of your order," Morgado continued, before going on to give an example of when Just Eat for Apple Watch would be useful.

"If you happen to have ordered from a restaurant a mile away and you're going to collect your food, it can get you to that restaurant by giving you directions on your wrist rather than having to take your mobile phone out. For those reasons I think it fits well," he said.

Morgado described the Apple Watch as "exploratory" but noted how this formed an important area of strategy for the company. "It's important to explore to understand the value of this experience to the consumer and to see whether its theatre or real," he said.

Apple recently announced that its Apple Pay contactless payment service will be available in the UK from July. Morgado told Computing that Just Eat is already looking into the use of the "commercially very interesting" technology.

"If you think about transaction fees for card-not-present transactions, which is obviously what one would do via a credit card on our website or existing apps, with Apple Pay, we overcome that. That could be financially very attractive for us as well," he said.

Prior to the interview, Morgado gave a presentation to the Open Mobile Summit audience, which included a video demonstrating how Just Eat could potentially connect with customers in future. That included possibilities such as Internet-of-Things technology and data analysis of customer diets.

Morgado described the video as blue sky thinking and that "at the moment we're very much focused on the experience that we have, which is the takeaway ordering experience, both in terms of delivery and collection".

However, Just Eat is actively examining which new technology and devices it could use to better connect with customers in future. "We're actively exploring experiences which are an alternative to the existing journey as well as experiences where the user interacts via different devices, not the ones that are out there already," Morgado said.

Ultimately, he added, Just Eat can only provide the best service possible when its "available to the customer wherever they might be on whatever device they have on their person. That's the focus at this point in time," he concluded.

Morgado spoke about how he is driving technology strategy at Just Eat in an in-depth interview with Computing last year. Computing's full interview with Morgado at Open Mobile Summit will be published in the near future.