Deliveroo names Eventbrite’s Laura Huddle as Australia’s head of commercial
Food delivery app Deliveroo has appointed Laura Huddle as Australia’s head of commercial.
Huddle joins Deliveroo after nine years with Eventbrite, where she was the company’s 20th employee, and held a number of roles including head of sales and business development for Asia Pacific, and ANZ’s head of marketing.
Huddle was at Eventbrite for nine years
“We couldn’t be more excited to be adding Laura to an already strong leadership team in Australia,” said Merten Wulfert, Deliveroo’s APAC managing director.
“Laura is a proven tech expert and brings more than a decade of product, marketing, and sales experience in leading roles across both Australia and San Francisco, where she’s worked at the heart of the world’s start-up sector for Eventbrite, University of California Berkeley, and Myspace.
“We can’t wait to see how Laura drives engagement, strategy, and growth with our restaurant partners who are at the centre of our business in Australia.”
Huddle will oversee Deliveroo’s relationship with more than 11,000 restaurants. The number of partner restaurants on the platform has doubled in 12 months.
“This is an incredibly exciting time to be joining Deliveroo, a company that is focused on transforming the way people think about and experience their favourite foods. Partnering with and enabling the success of Australia’s best and most-loved restaurants is key to this,” Huddle said of her new role.
“There’s no doubt that the traditional restaurant sector is changing as consumers are looking for both the convenience of on-demand food delivery and an amazing dine-in experience. I’ll be focusing on ensuring that Deliveroo can best position our partner restaurants to succeed across both.”
Last year, Deliveroo introduced Marketplace+, a feature allowing small takeaway restaurants with their own delivery service to join the platform and use its rider network of 8,000. It also introduced a Restaurant Perks program to provide restaurants discounts on business services from partners including Tyro and Sidekicker.
Earlier this year, the platform became the first to launch a subscription service, Deliveroo Plus, and appointed Joanne Woo as head of corporate affairs and Jeremy Brook as head of marketing in Australia.
However, despite these wins, Deliveroo and competitor Uber Eats have faced criticism over their treatment of workers. Last year, Deliveroo lost employees’ contracts and shifted liability to them, along with extending delivery distances, meaning riders experienced a reduction in pay by 30-40%. And earlier this year, Deliveroo proposed a new classification beyond the current employee versus contractor split, which it argued would reflect new ways of working and give contractors more workplace rights.
That claim was met with concern, with economist Jim Stanford telling The Sydney Morning Herald: “The business model of companies like Deliveroo, Uber and Lyft is completely dependent on their ability to assign workers as contractors not employees. If these companies had to pay minimum wage and other normal conditions of employment they would not be viable.”
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