Former Deliveroo exec profiles

Dan Warne, a former Deliveroo executive, is building Sessions as a platform that turns local food brands into franchised delivery and high street businesses. (forbes.com) Forbes reported on April 8 that Sessions had passed £65 million in sales, was profitable, was growing about 70% year on year, and worked with more than 400 partners. Warne joined Deliveroo as its 12th employee and later ran its United Kingdom business. (forbes.com) Sessions says it gives founder-led food brands technology, data and operating support, then expands them through 400-plus delivery kitchens and high street restaurants. The company says its system handles order aggregation, brand compliance and market selection. (sessions.co.uk) The pitch is built around a problem Warne described at Forbes: restaurant demand has moved online, but most restaurant economics still depend on a physical site. He said operators have absorbed delivery costs and digital acquisition costs without getting the scale advantages that online retail businesses captured. (forbes.com) That model took shape during and after the coronavirus pandemic, when delivery became a larger part of how people bought meals and many hospitality businesses were under pressure from inflation and weaker consumer demand. Sessions says it pivoted during the pandemic from its original food hall business into a restaurant expansion model. (sessions.co.uk) (news.sky.com) The company was founded in 2020 by Warne and Ian Banks, the former chief financial officer of Soho House, with leisure executive Graham Turner as chair. In January 2022, it raised £7.4 million to fund expansion, including plans for 500 more kitchens and two more food halls. (standard.co.uk) In April 2024, Sky News reported that Sessions raised another £3 million from Guinness Ventures and planned to use the money to launch a franchising arm. Sky said the company then worked with brands including SoBe Burger, Little Bao Boy and Patty Guy, and had delivered more than 3.5 million orders across its digital and physical platforms. (news.sky.com) Sessions now describes itself less as a single restaurant group than as a distribution and operating layer for food brands. On its website, it says SoBe Burger generated more than £20 million in sales in the last 12 months and that Mikos Gyros reached more than 100 live sites within weeks of launch. (sessions.co.uk) The thread running from Deliveroo to Sessions is Warne’s bet that restaurant growth will come from brand licensing, shared kitchen capacity and software, not just from opening one new site at a time. Forbes’ profile suggests that bet has moved from a startup pitch to a profitable business with national reach. (forbes.com)