After six solid years of explosive growth across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Europe, the Toronto-based company behind everyone's favourite order-ahead app is scaling back operations due to the economic impacts of COVID-19.

The founders of Ritual, a service that allows users to order and pick up their food without waiting in line (among other things), announced on Thursday that they would be reducing their workforce by more than half.

"The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a sudden and devastating impact on the restaurant industry, which has in turn impacted our business," reads a letter signed by Ritual co-founders Ray Reddy, Larry Stinson and Robert Kim.

"Our hearts go out to our merchants and their employees who have been affected by COVID-19 - they serve as the life of the cities in which we operate, and we remain steadfastly committed to supporting this amazing community."

As of Saturday, the company's app is still working normally in Toronto, and the founders gave no reason to believe that this would change - which is good, because despite our affinity for lining up, Torontonians really like using Ritual.

The company will, however, be winding down and then eventually withdrawing its operations in Germany and in the Netherlands as part of what it calls "necessary steps to restructure how we operate and put us on solid footing to continue to serve our customers, merchants and neighbourhoods during this moment and the recovery to follow."

Ritual's founders also stated that they had made "the very difficult decision" to reduce the size of their team globally by "just over half."