Ghost kitchens: win real customers with virtual kitchens

Idea Factory

Nowadays nearly everything we do happens in the cloud. No wonder why so many businesses are willing to shift to the cloud system. That’s how virtual restaurants emerged.

Cloud kitchens — a principally new concept of building a restaurant business. According to this, a restaurant kitchen is viewed as one of food productions across the city. Whereas the restaurant brand is an evolutionary continuation of food delivery.

What is it?

Ghost kitchens are facilities built to cook food specifically for delivery. They are also called cloud kitchens, shared kitchens, or virtual kitchens with the delivery-only food brands operating within them are known as virtual restaurants.

Why is it worth doing?

According to Statista, an American 17-billion delivery market is projected to reach $24 billion by 2023. Globally, the virtual kitchen market size will exceed $2,6 billion by 2026.

The research reveals that 60% of consumers in America are ordering delivery or takeout at least once a week. Therefore, more and more dark kitchens appear in order to meet this shift in demand. On top of shifting to cloud kitchens, entrepreneurs should reconsider their approach to the delivery game.

Advantages

Low expenses

While traditional restaurants have to pay a great deal of money for rent and serve crowds of customers in a hall, other restaurants are shifting to the virtual model. Cloud kitchens function as a center of food delivery, so there is no need to rent a pricey commercial property or employ waiters.

In contrast to traditional restaurants, ghost kitchens have no dine-in areas – only kitchen space for culinary staff to cook meals. One shared kitchen may also serve different restaurants. Meals cooked in cloud kitchens are delivered to customers through online delivery companies, such as Deliveroo, Foodpanda, and Uber Eats.

Scalability

Chain restaurants have to put much effort to expand even across the district. However, virtual kitchens are much more scalable since there are fewer facilities needed.

Measurable marketing

As all the orders are made distantly, it is easier to manage all the processes. The models of digital marketing work effectively and everything is displayed in the company’s analytics.

Drawbacks

Unawareness

So far cloud restaurants are a new industry whereas typical restaurants are familiar to everyone. Hence you have to find out how many processes work by yourself.

No direct contact

Due to the remote sales, there is no direct contact with a customer before the order. So you cannot persuade those who doubt, push those who are interested or give recommendations.

Internet-dependent

As a result of a distant service, you are constantly dependent on the Internet, online ads, and sales channels.

How to create a ghost kitchen?

Select a space

It is better to open a dark kitchen in a residential district. There is less competition and faster delivery.

The kitchen area is based on the size of delivery and product range. For instance, if your kitchen offers only sushi and serves around 50 orders a day, 25-30 square meters is enough. Other requirements for dark kitchens are similar to standard ones.

Equip the kitchen

There must be neutral equipment made of stainless steel (sinks, tables, hoods, etc.). Other things depend on the product types which your ghost kitchen is going to cook.

Automatize the project

The competitiveness of a cloud kitchen depends on the amount of food and how fast orders are served. After the pandemic people became more exacting while the number of virtual restaurants was increased.

In order to make the kitchen work effectively, you should automatize it as much as possible. Otherwise, you will have to expand the staff and increase the costs for salaries.

The range of a virtual kitchen should not be very wide but yet ample for experiments. The main thing is to make sure that food will be tasty even after delivering. Include classic meals and bestsellers in your menu.

Establish a delivery service

You can join your ghost kitchen to aggregators, use your own couriers, or combine both. The first option suits kitchens with a small number of orders. In that case, it is better off collaborating with aggregators rather than employing couriers by yourself. Besides, aggregators help you test the demand for your product and understand whether it’s worth developing further.

Select promotion channels

Though you can save money on the space and salaries, you have to invest a lot in advertisements. Besides traditional tools like SMM, contextual and target advertising, you can collaborate with bloggers and social media platforms. Alternatively, you can agree with aggregators on a special offer: free delivery or a meal as a gift.

Startups

CloudKitchens

Total of investments: $400 million

The company provides commercial ghost kitchens to delivery-only restaurants. In addition to space, partner restaurants also get logistics (delivery) and facilities services. Besdies, CloudKitchens offer a delivery management system, developed to function as a hub where restaurants can track their sales and deliveries. Thanks to its infrastructure and software, food operators can open delivery-only locations with minimal capital expenditure and time.

xRobotics

The startup created a robotic pizza-maker. The robot adds all the necessary ingredients to the pizza automatically. What employers have to do is to give the rolled dough and then put the pizza in the oven.

One robot can make 3 pizzas simultaneously which allows cooking 60 pizzas per hour. The system can also boost productivity if there are too many orders and make even 150 pizzas per hour. The menu is set up through any POS system or API. You can control the robot via apps on IOS or Android.

Karma Kitchen

Total of investments: $250 million

The company transforms commercial spaces into ghost kitchens and storage facilities for food and beverage companies. It provides both shared and private kitchens, along with space for anchor production. Their cloud kitchens come equipped with essential things and services designed for successful daily operations.