A Chicago menu site built by two hungry programmers.

Grubhub began in Chicago in 2004. Business Insider, profiling the company in February 2012, said its founders, Matt Maloney and Mike Evans, were both working as developers at the rental listings site Apartments.com, where late nights at the office meant a lot of ordered-in dinners. Maloney told the magazine that the pair were tired of ordering the same pizza again and again, and that hunger really was what started the business. The early version, the magazine said, was a simple look-up site for delivery and takeout restaurants in a user’s neighbourhood. English Wikipedia describes the idea as an alternative to paper menus.

The early company was small and practical. Business Insider reported that Evans left his job to work on the site full-time, and that an early funding round came in 2007 from Amicus Capital, Origin Ventures and a group of angel investors. Maloney, who became chief executive, was candid about the visual side of the business in that interview: neither founder was an artist, he said, so they had to hire someone to put graphics together that would attract diners and restaurants to the site.

English Wikipedia records that the founders won the University of Chicago Booth School of Business New Venture Challenge with their business plan in 2006, and that the company expanded beyond Chicago with new markets including San Francisco and New York in the years that followed. By the time of the 2012 profile the website also had a mobile app, and the company had moved office several times as its staff grew. Maloney told Business Insider that at every move the team had assumed the new space would be big enough, and that every time it had been wrong.

The company wrote its name GrubHub, with a capital H, in its early years, the form Business Insider used in 2012; it is now written Grubhub in running text, and English Wikipedia notes that the current logo sets the name in capital letters.

Seamless, Just Eat Takeaway and Wonder.

The defining merger of Grubhub’s history was with Seamless, the New York ordering service that Jason Finger and partners started in 1999 as SeamlessWeb to let companies order food for their staff. TechCrunch reported in June 2011 that the private equity firm Spectrum Equity had bought a minority stake in SeamlessWeb from Aramark, and that SeamlessWeb’s operations would be separated from Aramark’s after the deal. Wikipedia records that the two companies announced their merger in May 2013 and completed it in August 2013, and that the combined business traded as GrubHub Seamless before taking the Grubhub name. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GRUB in 2014.

The next change of owner came from Europe. The Guardian reported that the Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway.com agreed to buy Grubhub in June 2020, and Restaurant Business describes Just Eat Takeaway.com as Grubhub’s owner from 2021, the year the deal closed. Wikipedia says that, as part of the change, Grubhub’s logo was redrawn to include the Just Eat Takeaway house symbol shared by the group’s other brands. TechCrunch reported that Just Eat Takeaway said in April 2022 that it was looking to sell Grubhub, less than a year after closing the purchase.

The buyer turned out to be Wonder. TechCrunch reported on 12 November 2024 that Just Eat Takeaway had agreed to sell Grubhub to New York-based Wonder Group, the company founded in 2018 by the e-commerce entrepreneur Marc Lore, and Restaurant Business reported on 7 January 2025 that Wonder had completed the acquisition. Wonder has owned Grubhub since January 2025. Restaurant Business said Wonder planned to make selected Grubhub restaurants available in its own app and to list its in-house restaurant brands on Grubhub, as part of what Lore described as a “super app” for meals. Grubhub remains based in Chicago.

That plan became visible in September 2025. Food On Demand reported on 2 September 2025 that Wonder was rolling out a new brand identity of its own and adding Grubhub partner restaurants to the Wonder app alongside its own concepts and Blue Apron meal kits.

Design and documentation.

A delivery app’s brand lives in more places than its home screen. The app icon is the smallest and most-repeated version of the identity: a square tile that has to read at thumbnail size beside dozens of others, so it usually reduces the brand to one letter, one symbol or one flat field of colour. Inside the app, that same colour tends to carry buttons, map pins and order-status screens, which is why delivery identities lean on a single owned hue rather than a full palette.

Off the phone, the brand travels with the courier. Insulated bags, backpacks and jackets turn the mark into street signage, and they are often seen from behind, in motion and in poor light, so a bold wordmark or symbol on a plain ground works better than fine detail. Restaurants add a third layer: window and door decals, counter stickers and tablet stands that tell passers-by which apps a shop takes orders from.

For a designer, the useful lesson is consistency across scale — the same colour and symbol should hold up on a phone icon, a courier bag and a shopfront sticker.

A one-word name in a mark that changes with the owner.

Grubhub’s identity is less about a fixed symbol than about a short, friendly name that has been redrawn as the company changed hands. Wikipedia’s record of the logos shows three recent stages: a wordmark used from 2016 until the Just Eat Takeaway purchase, a version used from 2021 to 2025 that added the Just Eat Takeaway house symbol so that Grubhub matched the group’s European brands, and a new logo in use since 2025, after the sale to Wonder, which Wikipedia shows set in capital letters.

Wikipedia says the 2021 change added the Just Eat Takeaway house to Grubhub’s logo as part of the acquisition, and it captions that version as aligned with Just Eat Takeaway branding. The logo shown for the period since 2025 follows the sale to Wonder.

Advertising gave the brand its best-known moment of the period. Wikipedia says that through 2020 Grubhub ran a series of animated television commercials showing people ordering food on the app, and that in January 2021 one of them, “Delivery Dance”, set to the song “Soy Yo” by the Colombian band Bomba Estéreo, spread online as a meme, with many viewers posting their own parodies.

The name has also outlived the brands Grubhub bought. Wikipedia records that the company acquired the Yelp-owned Eat24 in 2017 and retired the Eat24 name the following year, and that it took over the campus-ordering app Tapingo in 2018 and folded it into the Grubhub app. Wikipedia lists Seamless, the partner in the 2013 merger, among Grubhub’s subsidiaries.

For a design guide, Grubhub shows how a plain, memorable name can carry a business through a merger, a foreign owner and a second sale, while the drawing around it is adjusted to signal who owns it. Compare it with DoorDash, which competes with it in the United States, and Uber Eats. For this guide we use order orange, brick and takeout kraft with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Grubhub’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.