How Ghost Kitchens Could Redraw the Restaurant Landscape
It’s convenience over community
Also by Nikhil Shah
As restaurants face minimum wage hikes and delivery chips away at in-house sales, the dining landscape could shape itself into AmazonBasics for food.
“In the next 18 months, 40 of the major cities in America are going to get delivered anything they want within 5 to 7 minutes for free,” said social media personality and Uber investor Gary Vaynerchuk about CloudKitchens to a room full of execs in a recent video.
The startup, funded by the controversial Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, is attempting to do to restaurants what Amazon did to retail. “The only thing that’s going to be left is the brand, the affinity that the consumer has for the brand, and that’s it,” he said.
Virtual restaurants—delivery-only brands—have garnered attention lately, but what impact will they have on dining as we know it?
To best answer this question, it helps to understand them from three angles: brick and mortar restaurants, ghost kitchens, and superstores. Anyone with under-utilized kitchen space in a restaurant or ghost kitchen can slap together a logo, menu, and name to generate incremental revenue for their existing business as quick as you can say “pizza.”…
