Ghost Kitchens – Fad or Future Industry Fixture?
by Bill Seufert - Principal, Prism Hospitality Group, LLC
A ghost kitchen (also known as a delivery-only restaurant, virtual kitchen, shadow kitchen, commissary kitchen or dark kitchen) is a professional food preparation and cooking facility set up for the preparation of delivery-only meals. However, a ghost kitchen differs from a virtual restaurant in that a ghost kitchen is not necessarily exclusive to a single restaurant brand but may contain kitchen space for multiple brands.
Delivery-only food platforms seem to be a natural evolution from other trends: namely, delivery services like Seamless/Grubhub and UberEATS, which connect existing restaurants to the on-demand needs of consumers. People are now more comfortable ordering online than ever before. Having food delivered is often easier than having to venture out to a restaurant or grocery store. According to industry sources, the food delivery market is expected to grow from $43 Billion in 2017 to $76 Billion by 2022.
Kitchen United in Pasadena, CA, a pioneer and major player in the ghost kitchen space, has a collection of 25 different restaurant cuisines from which customers can choose. Their website, https://order.kitchenunited.com/pasadena, features a variety of “collections” such as local favorites, light & fresh and vegan menu options for customers to browse and select desired menu choices for delivery or pick-up. Currently operating in 5 major cities in the US, Kitchen United has plans to open 11 Ghost Kitchens in Manhattan over the next several years.
In New York, Green Summit’s brands offer all sorts of cuisine “concepts,” including meatballs, salad/sandwich/juice, and burgers/grilled cheese. Green Summit is just one example of a growing wave of ghost restaurants that skip the storefront and bring food straight to the customer.
For Green Summit, which has an exclusive agreement with Seamless/Grubhub for delivery, there’s one major benefit to operating a virtual restaurant: You can’t beat the cheap rent. The company’s midtown Manhattan commissary at 146 East 44th Street has had a big advantage from the start: It doesn’t have to devote square footage to customer seating and waiting areas.
“To the consumer, it’s very much a kitchen,” Peter Schatzberg, Founder of Green Summit says. “There’s an area with a grill, people working and portioning, and a room adjacent to the kitchen where orders are assembled. They’re all made to order, and stations are set up by category. For instance, there’s a sandwich area producing sandwiches for multiple brands. All the ingredients across brands are in the same areas, but you get specialization in staff where they focus on making salads and sandwiches, for instance. That’s all they do. It makes a better-quality product, which ties into economies of scale.”
Good Uncle is a New York-based startup which is currently test-marketing at Syracuse University in upstate New York. The company sets up agreements with established restaurants with limited or no delivery service in Syracuse to license their recipes and then recreate them in the Good Uncle commissary. Users—college students are a current target market—then order meals through the Good Uncle app or through GrubHub and pick them up from one of several stops along a predetermined campus delivery route.
Good Uncle currently has licensing agreements with New York restaurants Croxley’s Ale House, Ess-A-Bagel, Joe’s Pizza, Sticky’s Chicken Fingers, and No. 7 Subs. Good Uncle founder Wiley Cerilli is an early-stage Seamless employee who later founded SinglePlatform before selling it for $100 million in 2012. Cerilli says Good Uncle’s cooks use the exact same ingredients as the restaurants they license menu items from and train with those outlets’ own cooks so dishes can be replicated as precisely as possible.
Good Uncle sells these meals at college student-friendly price points that range from $7 to $16 per item. And because customers pick up their food at a central pickup point, they pay no delivery fee.
To read more on this subject, click on the web link below:
How to Run a Ghost Kitchen - On the Line | Toast POS (toasttab.com)