If you run a fast food or takeaway business, the star rating sitting next to your name on a delivery app probably matters more to your weekly footfall than almost anything else you do. That makes a fresh investigation from the Competition and Markets Authority worth paying attention to, even if your own shop has nothing to hide: the regulator is now actively testing whether the review and pricing systems takeaways rely on every day are working the way customers assume they are.
What the CMA is actually looking at
On 27 March 2026 the CMA opened formal investigations into five companies over how they handle reviews and ratings, Just Eat among them. The specific question for Just Eat is whether its star-rating methodology has inflated the scores shown for some restaurants and grocers on the platform, potentially giving diners a misleading picture of quality before they order. The same batch of cases looked at Autotrader and Feefo over one-star reviews that may have been left out of published ratings, Dignity over claims staff were asked to write positive reviews, and Pasta Evangelists over allegations that customers were offered undisclosed discounts for leaving five-star reviews on delivery apps.
None of the five has been found to have broken the law at this stage, and the CMA has said it expects to update on progress later in the year. But the direction of travel is clear: a platform’s rating system is no longer treated as just a UX feature, it is something a regulator can formally examine.
Hidden fees are under the same spotlight
The reviews probe sits alongside a parallel crackdown on “drip pricing” — charges that only appear once a customer is deep into checkout. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gives the CMA power to fine a business directly, without going to court, for up to 10% of its worldwide turnover. It used that power for the first time on 15 April 2026, issuing a £4.2 million fine plus £760,000 in customer refunds against the AA and BSM over a £3 booking fee that only appeared at the final step of checkout. Four more drip-pricing investigations, opened in late 2025, are still working through the system.
For a takeaway, the practical read-across is simple: any extra charge a customer only discovers after they have already chosen their food — a service fee, a small-order surcharge, a card charge — now sits in exactly the kind of territory the CMA is actively fining businesses over. Showing the full price upfront, whether a customer is ordering through an app or straight from a website, is the safest place to be.
What it means day to day
None of this requires a takeaway in Westminster, a chip shop in Holbeck or a kebab house in Croydon to do anything differently overnight — the investigations are into the platforms and a handful of named businesses, not the restaurants that list on them. But two habits are worth checking against your own practice while the scrutiny is live. First, never offer a discount, free item or any other incentive in exchange for a five-star review without making that arrangement obvious to anyone reading it — that is precisely what Pasta Evangelists is accused of doing. Second, if you take orders directly through your own website or phone line, make sure any delivery charge, minimum-order fee or card surcharge is shown before a customer commits to paying, not added on afterwards.
It is also a reminder that genuine reviews are worth more now than ever. A business with an honestly-earned run of good ratings has nothing to lose from closer regulatory attention to how ratings are calculated — if anything, a cleaner system should make a consistently well-run takeaway easier for customers to find.
What happens next
The CMA’s five review-practice investigations and its wider drip-pricing work are both still open, with further findings expected later in 2026. If any of the platforms are found to have broken consumer law, the CMA can order changes to how ratings are calculated and displayed — which would directly affect how a takeaway’s own rating looks to customers, through no action of its own. It is worth keeping an eye on how the Just Eat investigation develops, since any change to the rating methodology could move individual scores up or down once a finding is made.
