Who created the first ghost kitchen?

Alliance Kitchen offers menu dishes from each of Inspire's five restaurant brands to guests who place their orders through each brand's online ordering platform or through external delivery partners. The concept of a ghost kitchen emerged around the same time that the demand for food delivery in restaurants began to increase. As more people started ordering food at home, ghost kitchen companies saw an opportunity to address this new demand and ghost kitchens became the solution. Fundamentally, ghost kitchens and traditional kitchens are quite similar in terms of meal preparation.

Police station kitchens are basically WeWork for restaurant kitchens, as Danny Crichton of TechCrunch wrote. These smart kitchens, as they are called on the CloudKitchens website, can include everything a restaurant or chef needs, such as sinks, WiFi and electricity. Anyone can cook their hamburger, tacos or pizza anywhere, which makes the ghost kitchen concept so lucrative and attractive to owners and investors. Ghost kitchens and the food delivery possibilities they offer are key factors in the continued success of many restaurants.

Eliminating physical visitors allows ghost kitchens to be placed away from high-rent urban places with a lot of foot traffic. On the other hand, you can invest in a ghost food truck that has meal preparation equipment and that also offers home delivery. Meanwhile, ghost kitchen companies have only become more prominent and are considered a threat to traditional restaurants. Restorers around the world recognized the changing market and led to the emergence of ghost kitchens.

More and more often, the food you order from a home delivery application is prepared by chefs who work for a restaurant that doesn't really exist, at least not in the traditional sense. Not all ghost kitchen businesses are inherently exploitative or obsessed with profits over labor; in fact, some may even be responsible for saving independent restaurants that might otherwise have failed during the most difficult times of the pandemic without earning additional income. Ghost kitchens, Uber services and third-party integrations also boosted the industry, reducing start-up capital requirements for new startups. Take Local Culinary as an example, a ghost kitchen company that operates more than 40 brands of virtual restaurants with generic names such as Chef Burger or Pizza Mania.

Either way, anyone can cook their hamburger, tacos or pizza anywhere, making the ghost kitchen concept so lucrative and attractive to owners and investors. On its website, Virtual Dining Concepts states that restaurants that install ghost kitchens to operate one or more of their brands can expect a 30 percent increase in profits. 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. Fortunately for ghost kitchens, restaurant brands can dramatically reduce their rents by sharing a kitchen space with another restaurant brand, greatly reducing costs and greatly increasing the chance of making a profit.