The CEOs of Hungry Monkey (Mat Caldwell) and Preoday (Andrew White) believe the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is right to be concered about a merger of Just Eat and Hungryhouse.

In an exclusive interview with Mobile World Live, White said if the merger goes ahead, Just Eat will “move towards holding a monopoly on the food mobile ordering market in the UK.”

“A key concern of the CMA is that such a monopoly would allow the holder to trap its restaurants into a cycle, charging ever-higher fees. The current figure, somewhere between 12 per cent and 14 per cent, already cuts into restaurants’ slim margins. Raised fees would slash them further,” he explained.

Caldwell agreed, noting any monopolisation by Just Eat “will not be beneficial to the restaurant partners in the long term”, and went so far as to warn the “quality of food could be affected” as a result.

Hungry Monkey is a food ordering app in Gibraltar, and Preoday provides an e-commerce platform offering mobile ordering services.

The two executives also spoke about how middle-man aggregators like Just Eat can be detrimental because it does not let restaurants access data about customers and orders – information which is crucial to improve marketing.

Read the full interview here.