
Cloud kitchens – commercial facilities built to produce food for delivery - mooreds
https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/12/05/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cloud-kitchens-aka-ghost-kitchens-in-2020/
======
Animats
It's really a way to exploit suckers who "want to run a restaurant". They're
in an awful position in a shared kitchen. The landlord, wholesale food service
provider, delivery service, and order flow source are the same. The
"restaurant owner" is thus an gig worker, easily replaced.

The first "Doordash Kitchens" location is near me. It has rows of metal
shelving where people come out of the non-visible kitchen and put packages on
delivery racks, to be picked up by waiting drivers in their waiting room.

They're not quite organized enough for it to be a drive-through operation for
the drivers. This works for Doordash because Doordash doesn't pay for driver
waiting time. If the drivers were employees, which is probably happening in
California next year, the next driver would take the next outgoing package,
regardless of destination, to optimize driver utilization.

~~~
pbreit
That’s a weird take. It’s providing opportunity to chef entrepreneurs who want
to cook but not run a “front of the house”.

Saying a successful chef is easily replaced is a bit insulting.

~~~
super-serial
So... just like Upwork is providing an opportunity to 'developer
entrepreneurs' who want to code but not handle the other aspects of contract
work?

Usually platforms like this are rigged so nobody comes out on top except the
company providing the platform. Maybe there are awesome chefs working in
Doordash food factories but it's probably because they just don't have any
better options.

------
adatavizguy
I've working in restaurants for 11 years in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and
Portland, OR. They only touched on the biggest benefit which is being able to
negotiate the lowest prices for wholesale food items. If they have single dish
washing facility and butcher on site, they will do even better. This is a
great idea because most people have no clue how to run a restaurant even
though they might be a good cook.

~~~
jerrysievert
just curious where in portland.

------
barbecue_sauce
I feel like this business model (which I like) is too reliant on the health of
the gig-delivery ecosystem, which I get the feeling is propped up by VC money
subsidizing delivery costs. Once the funding dries up and the deliveries stop
flowing as easily, these types of kitchens might be in danger.

~~~
alex-wallish
A successful cloud kitchen will be operating many restaurants from a single
location, ideally with enough demand to justify full-time deliveries from that
single location. This cuts out the need for the gig worker. Instead of having
to have people distributed around a city so that they can pick up food from
location A and deliver it to location B, location A is now fixed and you can
have a single driver, or drivers delivering from that specific cloud kitchen.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
It really never occurred to me that they would employ their own delivery
drivers in today's economy, but I guess if local pizzerias can do it, why not
other restaurants with significant volume?

~~~
ashleylovesfood
Pizza delivery = the OG cloud kitchen. They revolutionalized delivery.

~~~
seltzered_
You might like the story of Pizzaoki operating as a delivery-only brand of
another restaurant in Oakland: [https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/02/11/dj-
steve-aoki-quietl...](https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/02/11/dj-steve-aoki-
quietly-opens-a-pizza-restaurant-in-oakland)

------
duxup
Doesn't seem too strange in the sense that I know of bakeries that while they
have a small storefront, actually in the back make a variety things to serve
local restaurants, and even rent some or all of the kitchen out to restaurants
and caterers.

Their bakery is really very little of what we think we see and in many ways
just little storefront on a kitchen that does a lot of work for other things
including delivery ... to another restaurant. Not too strange to think of it
going straight to someone's front door.

I like to cook but I really don't get the time or space. I can see that
kitchen in the back ... man it's nice.

------
zippergz
Maybe it's just an irrational, emotion-based response, but I really prefer to
order delivery from bricks and mortar restaurants I know and can walk into,
and where it feels like they have a strong stake in their long-term
reputation.

~~~
dcolkitt
That's one perspective. But the other is that cloud kitchens drastically lower
the barriers to entry by removing nearly all of the upfront capital costs.

That gives young chefs more freedom to innovate and pursue their own vision.
Rather than conforming to the risk-averse demands of capital investors.

On an ecosystem level it also drastically increases the competitiveness of the
local market. This may be overlooked by the predominately NYC/SF/LA crowd
here, but many locales in American don't have many great restaurants. Lower
barriers to entry increase competitive intensity.

If you live in Peoria, IL and want to have Ethiopian for dinner, it's probably
not a question of choosing an already established high-quality brick-and-
mortar. It's most likely a mediocre low-quality monopoly, or maybe even no
Ethiopian whatsoever.

~~~
blackearl
If there was a way to WeWork a kitchen while still being able to have a health
inspector validate everything's in order, that would be fine. The article only
briefly touches on that, and I'm not sure how a grubhub/doordash would
validate (or if they care). Until that's explained I'll stay away from the
possibility of a fly-by-night restaurant.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
I think these places exist (commissary kitchens), they just don't market
themselves that way.

~~~
mooreds
Yes, commissary kitchens typically require health inspector approval and
proper insurance from any food company that wants to work on its premises.

------
blackearl
There are a few "restaurants" near me that don't have any brick-and-mortar
presence. The food they offer suspiciously looks like what you could get at
your grocery's frozen food section. I'm not a fan of this model as I've seen
it so far. You don't need much, you can have the Domino's style food counter
and a stool (aka don't eat here, go outside), but not having a real storefront
rubs me the wrong way.

~~~
Maxious
A YouTuber successfully became a verified Deliveroo selling microwave meals
[https://youtu.be/k47u9tduwb8](https://youtu.be/k47u9tduwb8)

~~~
Nextgrid
I'm not surprised at all given the people supposed to verify restaurants'
applications are most likely the same monkeys that run their customer service
(outsourced of course, what a surprise).

------
markmiro
In a few years if this takes off we can get all our meals from cloud kitchens.
I like that I don't have to drive to the grocery store or restaurant, and
instead, they drive to me.

If delivery gets optimized enough that it's no cheaper than making food at
home then we can start doing nutrition trials like never before.

We forget that food is fuel. We know how to make it taste good, but it's an
important aspect of our health. A lot of restaurants already allow selecting
vegam, or gluten-free. Ideally, we would be able to try all sorts of things:

1) Select an elimination diet plan and since all meals are delivered you're
more likely to stick to it. Different foods will get cut out and you can
figure out if there's an allergy you're not aware of

2) If you're eating healthy, it's more trackable. It'll be possible to get a
monthly email that tells you what nutrients you got. You can get blood tests
to see if the nutrients are actually being absorbed.

3) Trackable food means I can pay less for insurance if I'm eating healthy.
Right now nutrition is a very messy field. Some some vegan is better, some
argue the paleo thing is best. How about we solve this with insurance? These
companies will effectively make bets on your health outcomes based on what
you're eating. Insurance companies that make bad bets will go out of business.
We can get the preventative medicine we've always wanted because the cost of
bad decisions will be reflected in your finances right away.

4) It might be easier to start a restaurant that serves a niche group since
you get some benefits that come from economies of scale.

~~~
r_singh
All the points you make here are true, but I just have this bias against food
made by corporations.

They don't prioritise their users high enough for me to trust them with what I
put inside myself.

I'd much rather order from a local mom pop style place whose owners I can
reach if I had to.

------
MentallyRetired
I love this idea. I don't understand why, in this day and age, I need a
kitchen in my house. I'm not a chef. I don't have a wood shop or an auto shop
in my house. I don't grow my own food or have my own cows. Cooking for myself
seems like an old fashioned kind of thing to me.

~~~
xg15
> _I don 't understand why, in this day and age, I need a kitchen in my
> house._

By that logic, you could remove pretty much everything from your home, apart
from a bed, bathroom, table and laptop.

But I can also think of two concrete reasons why you would want to cook for
yourself (in addition to training a potentially valuable skill or treating it
as a leisure activity)

\- Cooking for guests: In some situations, you want to treat guests with a
restaurant-like experience at home. In such a situation, takeout may be either
impractical or inappropriate. For social reasons, it may be important that the
food is prepared by yourself and not commissioned to someone else.

\- Controlling ingredients: When ordering takeout (or eating at a restaurant),
the restaurant is in full control of ingredients and will choose them in a way
that is optimal for the restaurant - but not necessarily optimal for you.
E.g., they may choose ingredients that taste well but are unhealthy it may
choose ingredients produced under problematic conditions.

~~~
adventured
> But I can also think of two concrete reasons why you would want to cook for
> yourself

The third one is cost. You can essentially always beat the restaurant on cost,
often by a lot, due to their overhead and desire to yield a profit for the
owner. At home you supply the labor and eat the profit (so to speak). Your
typical family will find it dramatically less expensive to eat in than to eat
out.

~~~
brianwawok
That’s kind of a wash. How much do you bill an hour as a developer, at least
$100? If it takes an hour to cook a meal, I doubt you saved $100 in cost.

Now obviously the number of hours you can bill in a day and be sane has a
limit...

~~~
esotericn
How much did you bill for this comment? Better stop reading.

Did you brush your teeth this morning? How much did you bill for that eh
buddy?

Come on now.

------
sidm83
Nobody here seems to have heard of Rebel Foods from India, which is (as per
its own claim) the largest cloud kitchen company in the world. They now have
their own 'brands' across multiple cuisines, leveraging the delivery services
provided by Zomato and Swiggy (both unicorns). Ref :
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/rebel-foods-which-
operates...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/rebel-foods-which-operates-
more-than-235-internet-restaurants-in-india-quietly-raised-125-million-this-
month/) [https://rebelfoods.co/](https://rebelfoods.co/)

------
AndrewKemendo
The current opaque way that ride matching is done where drivers cannot know
the destination before accepting a ride, creates an environment where
providers (drivers) are increasingly using gaming techniques to get around
this restriction, to the detriment of customers. An example of this is
something that commonly happens at airports, where a driver will accept a ride
and then wait around for customer to cancel if the trip isn't to the driver's
liking.

Similarly, on Amazon marketplace the problems with counterfeit goods etc...
are well documented, where a marketplace of sellers is gaming the system at
the detriment of consumers.

I can see the same type of gaming systems potentially happening here if there
is opacity in the market information for both suppliers and customers. For
example a kitchen could replace organic ingredients for non-organic ones and
consumers wouldn't know the difference. Or if an order is accepted and turns
out it is too large or too small they would delay fulfillment forcing a
consumer to restart the process.

As with all of the gig-economy work and poorly regulated markets generally, it
has some consistent patterns where incentives for low prices drive a race to
the bottom and I don't think that's something I'd want from my food.

It might be worth noting that CloudKitchens is Travis Kalanick's new startup.
So I would expect that the vision he brought to cab/rideshare is the same
here, but in the food market, using UberEats as first point of proof that it
can be successful already.

[1][https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/the-next-big-bet-for-
forme...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/the-next-big-bet-for-former-uber-
ceo-travis-kalanick-may-be-cloud-kitchens-in-china/)

~~~
zippergz
> An example of this is something that commonly happens at airports, where a
> driver will accept a ride and then wait around for customer to cancel if the
> trip isn't to the driver's liking.

How is this possible? I thought the driver didn't get to see the destination
until they actually pick up the rider.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Because they call the rider and ask where they are going.

------
buboard
‘Cloud kitchens ‘ Lol lol is this the WeWork of food? These fries are great
technology

~~~
mywittyname
Yeah, I know.

They are called commissaries, not 'cloud kitchens', not 'ghost kitchens'.
Commissaries are not new, they are used _all the time_ in the restaurant
industry. If you've had food from a food truck or caterer, then that food was
likely prepared in a commissary.

Giving hip new names to old tech is not doing anyone a favor. Preparing food
in a commissary is a sound, established business model. The idea doesn't need
any fluff, delivering food prepared in a commissary, rather than a restaurant,
makes perfect sense. The benefits are, lower real estate costs, shared labor,
fewer stops for delivery personnel, and the ability to quickly change food
offerings & experiment.

~~~
mattmaroon
They are not the same, but ghost kitchens do operate out of a commissary. A
commissary is a shared use kitchen. A ghost kitchen (which admittedly would
probably be better called a ghost restaurant) is basically just a
delivery/pickup-only restaurant. It may operate out of a commissary or its own
space.

The Food Corridor is a (very terrible) piece of software that allows bookings
for kitchen space, so they probably focus on the ones that work from public
kitchens for that reason, but lots of them have dedicated kitchens or rent
from a church hall or VFW.

~~~
ashleylovesfood
EEK. CEO of The Food Corridor here. Are you a client?

~~~
mattmaroon
I work out of a kitchen that uses TFC and frankly everyone finds it difficult
to use. Sorry!

~~~
ashleylovesfood
Got it. We just finished a cohort of food business interviews to help identify
and fix these issues. You should see some changes to the booking system and
mobile enhancement releases in the coming months. If you ever want to talk to
us directly and provide feedback, we are open to it. hello@thefoodcorridor.com

~~~
mattmaroon
Great. Thinking about it, I should apologize for "terrible". That's an
exaggeration to be sure. And also, I suspect some of the problems we have are
our kitchen's implementation.

------
nlh
Here’s the part I’ve never quite understood (perhaps because I’m not a budding
chef or restaurateur):

Isn’t the whole point/dream of becoming a professional chef, opening up a
restaurant, etc. to have the experience of running your own space, designing
it, building a menu, meeting your diners, watching their faces, seeing the
lines form outside, getting a reputation, winning a Michelin Star, AND cooking
some great food?

It feels like the whole model of the ghost/cloud/whatever kitchen removes 99%
of that joy/misery/experience and strips it down to just making food and
reading online reviews (good or bad) from people with no personal connection
to you whatsoever.

I’m sure I’m missing something here, so please help me out, but it seems like
this business model is terrific for the operator of the cloud kitchen and
terrific for the delivery apps but turns the chefs into little more than
assembly line factory workers.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
The owner (of the restaurant concept) and the chef are often the same person
in operations like this. It might take less capital to get off the ground than
a full-scale restaurant. Almost certainly less, considering you have to do all
the same things in a restaurant, plus hire and decorate front of house. By
corollary, there's less at risk by trying a cloud kitchen first. It's a way to
fail inexpensively.

More generally, most people don't have the luxury to simply do whatever they
would optimally prefer to. They generally have to trade off preferences and
pragmatics. Dreams don't put food on the table. So if there's a niche, in
evolution or business, something is going to fill it eventually.

~~~
mattmaroon
It's orders of magnitude less. Where I live, in a very cheap part of the
country, I could buy a failed restaurant with enough of the pieces in place to
not have to build out (permitting is a nightmare in the food world) for let's
say $50k. That'd be a bad place in a bad area with most of the appliances
gone. But I'd still have a hood and sprinklers and plumbing, so I'd be able to
sink another $50k in and have a kitchen running before too long. If I wanted a
bad failed restaurant somewhere that might actually bring foot traffic, double
that cost.

Or I can rent a commissary kitchen for $18/hr, plus $100-$200/mo or so in dry
and refrigerated storage, and scale from there. I could get started in a week.

To most chefs, this is the difference between "I can afford this now" and "I
will literally never in my entire life be able to afford this."

------
robk
These are game changers in constrained cities. My area had zero healthy
options until dark kitchens opened up like 5 options this past year. Amazing
for us.

------
ptasci67
As a concept this seems to make a lot of sense to me. A restaurant actually
seems like the worst place to prepare food meant for delivery. I think of my
local taco place which usually has a line of Door Dash, Postmates, and Uber
Eats drivers out the door while people are trying to order.

I am curious how this article relates to Cloud Kitchens[1] the Travis Kalanick
startup because I am skeptical they arrived at the same name out of
coincidence.

[1] [https://www.cloudkitchens.com/](https://www.cloudkitchens.com/)

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
It's pretty annoying when you walk into a place like Chipotle and they're
making five online orders in front of you. Like, I'm standing right here. I
put way more effort into doing business with you by making a physical
presence. Please prioritize my order.

~~~
jcomis
Chipotle doesn't make online orders on the front line, so there's that.

~~~
jSully24
Some Chipotle locations have a separate line for take out orders, but not all.

------
ggm
I would expect the Bangladeshi and Sikh community to metaphorically eat the
vc's lunch if they organized. Or the contingent of Mexicans who run almost all
US kichens by repute (ie, unionised and form collectives to do this better and
cheaper). Sikhs cook for thousands every week at the temple, they have volume
down pat. Bangladeshi are the mexicans of Indian restaurant food worldwide, it
often doesn't matter what subregion it says over the door, they're doing the
cooking.

------
duffpkg
Seems to me that many of the comments are failing to compare this model to the
common alternative, which is a public facing restaurant. The failure rate of
those is at least ~60%, so is this "cloud" model likely to be worse than that?
I doubt it.

As a model, I think the customer here is not so much a food buyer but a
restaurant starter and that is a bottomless well. This concept is a natural
outgrowth of the current trend in quasi-legal "instagram restaurants" . It
also meshes well with the fickle appetites and food trends of modern day. A
cronut kitchen can sell out for 6 months and then fade into a ramen burger for
another 6 months, all from the same physical kitchen.

I think that it is more sustainable than the food-truck -> sit-down-restaurant
strategy that hasn't worked for more than a handful of entrepreneurs.
American's love to eat a cornucopia of tastes and dishes but we absolutely
hate to pay more than a nickel for it. The underlying cost structure of the
cloud kitchen is more amenable to that sentiment.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
I don't buy a lot of food online. If you don't have a storefront, I won't know
you exist. These dark kitchens won't even let you pick up the food yourself,
from my understanding. I have to go through a middle man. So, you've already
lost me as a customer unless I happen to have your specific food delivery app
installed -- and that's a pretty fragmented market.

~~~
fyfy18
> I don't buy a lot of food online

Ok so this doesn't apply to you. There's plenty of other people who do.

------
chinesempire
I've heard them with the name "dark kitchens", but it was already common (at
least I'veeen seen it already in Italy): tiny storefronts where most of the
food is made for delivery

They might or might not be on popular delivery apps, some of them take orders
only by phone, some rely on gig workers, some others are just family
businesses

The most effective marketing materials, apart being on glovo/deliveroo/justeat
etc. are flyers left in the mailbox

In Italy the ones that started it were kebab and pizza places

------
40acres
Solid idea, I wonder about what type of scale makes an entire kitchen facility
viable. I've known many chefs who were able to make a small catering career
with under 5 employees, does a cloud kitchen help them out or are they better
off cooking out of the home and/or a food cart?

------
zemo
Here's a great 24 minute documentary on Cloud Kitchens, the virtual kitchen
startup by Travis Kalanick:
[https://vimeo.com/341502917](https://vimeo.com/341502917)

------
jmpman
Reheating a sous-vide entree, searing a protein, packaging up for delivery?
Olive Garden in a box?

