Ghost kitchens do not accommodate in-house diners or walk-in diners, since they focus only on delivery, that is, on preparing food once the order arrives through a delivery application or an online ordering system. It's a rather obscure name given to a place where food is cooked, but don't worry, it's not what it seems. A dark kitchen is a kitchen in which food is cooked like any other kitchen, but the mode of delivery of food is only through online channels. Dark kitchens don't promote the idea of having a dining area.
The idea has different names, such as cloud kitchen, remote kitchen, virtual kitchen and ghost kitchen. But it mainly refers to any restaurant or food service that is only delivered through the online channel. Ghost kitchens, also known as dark kitchens, are commercial kitchens optimized for food delivery services. Each delivery kitchen is located in areas with a high concentration of demand for delivery.
The kitchens themselves don't have a storefront and the staff prepares dishes from their menus that are only available for home delivery. Think of it as a virtual restaurant that works like a digital store, with some members of the company's staff working on online order fulfillment. Instead of a physical location, your presence is digital, allowing you to reach more customers than you could with just one physical location. ghost kitchens and the food delivery possibilities they offer are key factors in the continued success of many restaurants.
We all know that restaurants are a low-margin industry, but ghost kitchens help you maximize those profits by managing your home delivery business more intelligently. You may already be delivering to your physical restaurant and wondering how it's different from a ghost kitchen. In a ghost kitchen, you are cooking in a kitchen with optimized delivery and designed to reduce unnecessary costs. To start with a ghost kitchen or a virtual kitchen, you'll start by renting space in a facility where you can prepare home orders.
Since your presence is digital with ghost kitchens, you can further maximize your exposure with several brands that are left without a single kitchen. To put the value of a ghost kitchen into perspective, let's say you have a franchise restaurant and, due to the pandemic, you had to close. Ghost kitchens helped traditional restaurants recover their losses and minimize employee layoffs by allowing them to prepare food for several brands and stay in business. Ghost kitchens come in all shapes and sizes, and some spaces are shared and others are used by a single brand of restaurants.
Opening a ghost or dark kitchen requires minimal investment and risk, with unlimited opportunities to grow your restaurant business in the online delivery world. As the 21st century progressed, the restaurant industry witnessed a radical change with the arrival of modern virtual restaurants dominated by apps, third-party aggregators, dark kitchens and ghost kitchens. Ghost kitchens offer endless possibilities in terms of what you can do to launch new brands or manage several virtual restaurants in one place, since your presence is online. Now that you understand the difference between a cloud delivery kitchen and a ghost kitchen, it's quite simple to understand the business model of a cloud kitchen.
Ghost kitchens provide you with premium real estate at a fraction of the cost compared to brick-and-mortar stores.
