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I Sold Microwave Meals On Deliveroo

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A London flat became a five-star Italian restaurant on Deliveroo — without a single inspector ever walking through the door.

On September 7, 2019, YouTuber Josh Pieters uploaded “I Sold Microwave Meals On Deliveroo,” a video documenting an investigative prank he ran with fellow creator Archie Manners. The premise was simple: could an unregistered, uninspected home kitchen get approved as a working restaurant on one of Britain’s biggest food delivery apps? The answer, as Pieters and Manners discovered, was yes — and it took almost no effort at all.

• Pieters registered a company called The Italian Stallion LTD, listed his own residential flat as the restaurant address, and built a parody website crediting Gemma Collins as head chef, complete with a photo of an AirPod disguised as a chunk of feta cheese.
• A Deliveroo representative told them they could go live under an “awaiting inspection” status despite having no food hygiene certification, and Deliveroo approved the listing and shipped over a merchant order-taking tablet.
• The “restaurant” fulfilled five orders and pulled in more than £100 selling supermarket ready-meals from Waitrose, reheated in a microwave and repackaged as takeout — with every customer later refunded in full.

Building a Restaurant Out of Nothing

The entire operation started with paperwork, not a kitchen. Pieters incorporated The Italian Stallion LTD, used his own flat as the trading address, and registered the “business” with his local council — the standard bureaucratic steps any legitimate restaurant would take before opening. From there he built a website designed to be absurd on close inspection: Gemma Collins was billed as the chef, and the food photography included a single AirPod passed off as a piece of feta. Nobody at Deliveroo appears to have looked closely enough to notice.

Getting Past the Gatekeepers

The one moment that should have stopped the prank cold was the food hygiene check. When Pieters and Manners were asked about their credentials, a Deliveroo representative simply told them they could launch under “awaiting inspection” status — no rating required up front, no visit scheduled first. Deliveroo approved the account and sent out the merchant tablet used to receive live orders, effectively greenlighting a restaurant that had never had a health inspector inside it.

An “awaiting inspection” restaurant, run out of a residential flat, with an AirPod standing in for feta cheese — and Deliveroo signed off on all of it.

Ready-Meals, Reheated and Repackaged

With the account live, the menu was never cooked from scratch — it was bought. Every dish on The Italian Stallion’s menu came straight from Waitrose and other nearby grocers as microwave ready-meals. Pieters started with a test order sent to a friend to confirm the system worked, then switched on a 40% discount for orders over £12.50 to push volume. Each time an order landed on the tablet, Pieters and Manners sprinted to the shop, grabbed the matching ready-meal, microwaved it, and dropped it into a takeaway container before the courier arrived.

This is the same kind of stunt journalism that runs through pieces like the video exposing a scammer call center from the inside — using the target’s own systems against them to prove a point that a straight explainer never could.

Five Orders, One Reveal

By the end of the run, The Italian Stallion had fulfilled five real customer orders and taken in more than £100. Rather than pocket the money or let anyone eat under false pretenses, Pieters tucked a letter explaining the whole experiment into every delivery bag, alongside a full cash refund of what the customer paid — between £10 and £12 per meal. No one was left out of pocket, and no one ate food they didn’t know the origin of once the letter reached their door.

Stunt Reveals Hidden Systemic Weaknesses

Stripped of the jokes, the video is a working demonstration of a real gap: a listing can go live on a major delivery platform before any hygiene inspector sets foot in the kitchen behind it. Pieters and Manners didn’t need to fake credentials or bribe anyone — they just filled out the forms Deliveroo asks for and waited to see what got waved through.

The prank runs the length of a single video and a handful of deliveries, but the mechanics are the whole story: a flat, a council registration, an “awaiting inspection” tag, and a tablet that started buzzing with orders almost immediately. That’s the entire loophole, laid out step by step, with the AirPod feta as the punchline nobody at Deliveroo caught.