Cloud kitchens, also called ghost kitchens, shared kitchens, or virtual kitchens, are commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery rather than sit-down service. These commissary kitchens work with delivery-only food brands to serve communities where they operate. Uber Founder and ex-CEO, Travis Kalanick, runs a popular ghost kitchen startup called CloudKitchens. This sub-sector is getting popular in some major cities.
Once a curious addition to the food delivery craze, ghost kitchens have taken new prominence amid the pandemic. A report by Restaurant Dive argues that these kitchens — delivery-only cooking warehouses, essentially — may play a prominent role in the food landscape of the future given the explosion of delivery apps, a movement toward convenience and the effects and after-effects of the virus on the dine-in restaurant space. In a similar vein, Chipotle is opening its first digital-only restaurant in New York state that caters solely to pick-ups and delivery.
Largely, you take a rent in a big city, turn that place into a place to cook food with no customer coming there to eat. Rather, you use delivery apps and bikers to send food to customers as they buy via their apps. One cloud kitchen can serve many delivery brands, making it a platform for sourcing cooked meals.
Cloud kitchens are commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery. They do not have brick-and-mortar dine-in areas and consist of shared kitchen space with culinary staff preparing meals that are then delivered to customers at home or at work, typically through online delivery companies such as Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub, and DoorDash. […]
Cloud kitchens are much cheaper to set up than brick-and-mortar restaurants; there’s no need for them to be in prime locations, no need for cool designs, and no need for seating space. One estimate we heard was that a brick-and-mortar restaurant in New York City costs $1 million to $1.5 million to set up, while a cloud kitchen can get up and running for $100,000.
Today in Nigeria, the food delivery business is still at infancy. Even most of the food delivery apps depend on regular sit-down restaurants. A good cloud kitchen can improve marginal cost, and use scale to reduce cost of meals by 30%, in Lagos, with an improved delivery logistics. Mamaput is for small business owners; cloud kitchen is for entrepreneurs. Nigeria wins with entrepreneurs, not small business owners. Let’s think big here.
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Ghost kitchens do not serve ghosts but human beings! Since they fit into the pandemic lockdown scenario quite well, the business model is sound but food safety is critical! Since the virtual kitchen exists to prepare a variety of meals for so many outlets, the chefs must also have top notch food preservation and storage facilities supporting them and their communications and access routes must be safe. Preplanning also has to be in view for the day to day operations. Cleanliness and the water supply must also be top notch. The space must be available to meet the economic order size operations.
Will require significant investment here, both on the source and delivery components, the app is least of the challenge.
Again, efficiency is a key metric in this kind of services, not when you want lunch by 2pm and it’s arriving by 4pm; it could end in tears…
A variant of Cloud kitchen does exist- personal kitchens. Here in portharcourt, there are alot of ‘instagram food vendors’.You call to order, a dispatch rider delivers it. But the food is prepared at their residential premises due to scale.
However there are few that have grown quite large and surprisingly brick and mortar stores are part of their expansion plan.