How do ghost kitchens work?
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Lets say you have a commercial kitchen. Your restaurant is fully equipped but you are not well known for your food. Perhaps you are a strip club, or a hooters, or a Chuck E. Cheese or something like that. The point is, it’s not a place where a customer would ever choose to order take out from, but you are non the less fully equipped to fulfil takeout orders.
So what do you do. Well, the answer is a ghost kitchen. Basically you start a new “brand” restraint that is only available on the delivery apps. You call your place “Pizza place E” and offer a verity of pizza options on your door dash or ubereats menu.
Customers see the new restaurant and are willing to give your pizza a try. What they don’t know is that the pizzas are actually coming from the kitchen of the local Chuck E. Cheese.
This worked really well for the places that were not known for quality food and maintained their business by offering other things that bring customers in the door. Chuck E. Cheese for example is more about the games than it is the pizza, always has been. But during pandemic that’s a tough business model, so they go with a ghost kitchen just to keep the staff employed.
There’s 2 other ways that ghost kitchens are used that are WAY less underhanded. The first is that a business might be using that kitchen for a particular use during the day hours, but at night it just sits idle. So they rent it out (or do it themselves). So the local catering company might rent their kitchen starting at 7 PM to someone who runs a take out business from 7 – 3 AM. OR it’s a well known restaurant who wants to offer food that’s off brand for them. A local pasta restaurant wants to sell burgers and fries on the takeout apps, that kind of thing.
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