Five Point Four, a famous health food delivery company and a major UberEats rival, recently announced that it has gone into administration, leaving all of its customers without prepaid meal orders costing as much as $145.
Founded by Ben Doolan, who is Brisbane's former young entrepreneur of the year, and heavily spruiked by social media influencers and personalities, recently told its awaiting customers that any of the orders would not be sent.
In an email that it recently sent to its customers, the company's management wrote, "For our customers with future prepaid orders, the customer service team will be working diligently to process your refund and will be in touch over the coming days. Thank you for being part of the 5.4 families and wish you all the best in reaching your health goals in the future." It followed this with, "In the face of increasing competition and our cost to serve, we have made the really difficult decision to stop taking orders with immediate effect as of today." The company then listed a hotline for all of their affected customers.
Unfortunately, a number of customers were expecting their meals to be delivered on the same day that the email was sent out. In fact, one customer told ABC that he was expecting his meals for the week to arrive this Wednesday. Before receiving the email, the prepaid cost for all of the meals went up to as much as $145.
In an interview, the distressed customer told the national broadcaster, "It was really irritating, the just stopped the service. Surely they could have seen it coming and shut down with some notice so people weren't put out?"
The company, which at one point in its almost 6-year run claimed to have as many as 20,000 customers and annual revenue of $12 million within 3 years of its opening, lodged a notice of administration to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) last Friday.
First established back in 2013, the company had more than 200,000 followers on Facebook and around 30,000 followers on Instagram. After some customers started questioning what's going on with the company, both of its social media pages were shut down. However, its website is still live, and the company is still posting social media promotions as of this month.
