Moments after he was announced as the government’s new “cost of living business tsar”, David Buttress, the multimillionaire co-founder and former chief executive of takeaway app company Just Eat, went out into his garden and inspected one of his chickens’ bottom.
“Long busy day with some great meetings,” Buttress tweeted on Monday night. “But always great to get home to the real world and ‘dad the chicken isn’t well can you go and check it’s [sic] bum’… keeping it real.”
Buttress, who has been tasked by the government with helping companies come up with “practical and real cost-of-living saving initiatives”, reported back to his 8,000 followers that in his “‘expert’ medical opinion” all was well with the chicken.
The chicken’s exact movements are unknown, but Buttress got straight to work on Tuesday, meeting the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, supermarket bosses and sports organisations to hammer out ideas for how to help hard-pressed families cope through the summer holidays, when children will not be able to get free school meals.
Steve Barclay, the Downing Street chief of staff, to whom Buttress will report, said the takeaway tycoon would bring a “wealth of experience” and “the vigour and ingenuity of business to go even further in efforts to support British families throughout this difficult time”.
The appointment of the takeaway millionaire, whose former company has been criticised for helping fuel an obesity epidemic, comes just days after the government’s long-awaited food strategy was criticised by leading experts. Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City, University of London and a former commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, said: “There are no commitments, no targets, and only tiny little bits of money. It’s classic Johnsonism: it ducks and dives, with rhetoric and mixed messages.”
Buttress, who started Just Eat’s UK operation in 2006 and was the company’s chief executive between 2013 and 2017, will not be paid for the government role, which lasts until the end of the year.
He probably doesn’t need the money. He made at least £17.4m selling off chunks of shares in JustEat between 2016 and 2017. The company went on to merge with Dutch rival Takeaway.com in a £6.2bn deal in 2020.
Buttress has tapped his Just Eat fortune for so-called “angel investments” in a similar way to the investors on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den TV show. He joined venture capital firm 83North and has made 10 angel investments in a variety of startups, predominately in food delivery.
He has invested in virtual restaurant brand Honest Food Company, Egyptian ordering service Elmenus and halal meat delivery service MyJam.
Some of his investments are driven more by his passions than a desire to make a big return. In 2017, he bought a stake in Dragons Rugby club in Newport, Wales, and was appointed its chairman.
Buttress, who grew up on a council estate in Cwmbran, Gwent, said it was a “huge personal honour for me to have the opportunity to make a real and positive impact on rugby in the region in which I grew up”.
He grew up supporting Pontypool but always identified with the Dragons. “My grandfather was treasurer of Pontypool for years,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “The other side of the family followed Newport – my father lives only a few metres from Rodney Parade and has been a Newport County season ticket holder for 60 years. As a Pontypool fan I always identified with the Dragons because they represent the elite end of the game in Gwent.”
While he invested a “relatively significant” sum in the Dragons, he has said his role expands far beyond benefactor. “That model does not work in rugby because it is short term,” he said. “I grew up in a council estate in Cwmbran and know the value of a pound; my mum worked part-time to get us through school and I do not throw money around. My job here is about building something that sustains and I would not leave a legacy if all I did was write cheques.”
Buttress went to Croesyceiliog comprehensive school, before studying law and business at Middlesex University. He has said he always wanted to work at a start-up and grow it into a unicorn – an investing term for a privately held business worth more than $1bn – even though his father cautioned that “unicorns don’t exist”.
He joined Coca-Cola in 1998 and held a variety of sales roles. While selling Coke to Danish restaurants Buttress bumped into Jesper Buch, who founded JustEat in Denmark in 2001. “We met up at Nando’s in Hammersmith, and I asked him what he was doing in Denmark. We got on really well. Over the flaming chicken, he told me about Just Eat and I was hooked. It bit me like a bug,” he told the Evening Standard.
Soon afterwards he quit Coke, and they set up a UK version of Just Eat in the basement of Buttress’ London flat. In the first month it turned over just £36, but soon it was raking it in.
His worst day at Just Eat was Valentine’s Day 2011 when the system buckled under demand. “The business was growing at 500% and couldn’t cope with the surge. It was not a romantic evening in the Buttress household as I spent the entire time on Skype and the mobile but we managed to fix it and we learned a lot.”
