Grubhub's Second CEO in Two Years Steps Down, Will Exit By May
Adam DeWitt, who became CEO of Grubhub in June 2021, was with the company in various positions for 11 years.
By Gabrielle Bienasz •
Sometimes you get free lunch on the job — and sometimes you have to leave the job where you help everyone else get lunch.
Adam DeWitt, who became CEO of Grubhub in June 2021, will step down by May 2023, the food delivery service's parent company, Just Eat Takeaway (JET) announced on Monday.
He will be replaced by Howard Migdal, who leads JET's Canadian subsidiary, SkipTheDishes, which is an online food delivery service in the country.
"Under DeWitt's leadership for the past 11 years as CFO, President, and most recently CEO, Grubhub has grown from $20 million to more than $2 billion in annual revenues," JET wrote in the press release.
DeWitt said in the statement he'd been at the company for 11 years. His bio said he helped Grubhub get through its IPO, which was completed in 2014. The co-founder of Grubhub, Mike Evans, recounted the long road Grubhub faced in going public, which included a merger with competitor Seamless, in his memoir "Hangry: A Startup Journey" in November.
But his tenure as CEO was relatively short. He took the reins as the Grubhub purchase by JET was finalized, replacing co-founder Matt Maloney, who then joined the company's board. Maloney left the company altogether several months later, in October 2021. Maloney had been with the company since its inception in the early 2000s.
JET announced in June 2020 that it agreed to buy the food delivery company for over $7 billion, at the height of the pandemic and ordering-out craze. It capped a "tumultuous" period for the company that included an almost-acquisition from Uber Eats, TechCrunch wrote at the time.
The combined company would serve over 70 million customers around the globe, JET said then.
However, while food delivery services are a winning concept for customers, it's a competitive business that can require high spending to acquire new customers (think things like marketing and ads), per TechCrunch.
In April 2022, JET announced in it planned to offload the food delivery giant, per Insider. JET said it was "actively exploring the introduction of a strategic partner into and/or the partial or full sale of Grubhub," at the time.
JET is the result of a merger between UK-based Just Eat and the Netherlands-based Takeaway.
