How do ghost kitchens work?
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It’s a kitchen that sends food out to customers – no dine in or carry out only delivery. Because of the common shared equipment and base ingredients in kitchens along with no need to differentiate a dining room to customers, one physical kitchen can house several ghost kitchens. This reduces startup and ops cost for a notoriously narrow profit margined industry.
Because no customers see in, some ghost kitchens are under fire as rebranding their exact business to always seem new and fresh/dodge accumulating poor reviews. In actuality they’re just recycling the same old everything.
For larger corporate “ghost restaurants” it is essentially a “secret menu” for delivery only, and comes right out of the same kitchen as everything else. For instance if you order a Melt Down melt, it’s gonna get made in your local Denny’s kitchen like anything else you’d order from Denny’s.
Some other variations include simply using someone elses kitchen in their off hours. Local restaurant closes at 5PM, you go in at 5:30 and set up, work all night, and close down.
Discovered this with Mr Beast Burgers in Pennsylvania. Our 7yr was dying to try it. It was a local pizza chain that microwaved a frozen burger.
Ghost kitchens became very popular here during the pandemic where, at one point, there were around 5 or 6 operating out of one restaurant kitchen that was impacted pretty hard as their main business was not take out. Not much advertising except on the food delivery apps. Most of them were burger/ fast food “restaurants” run out of a finer dining kitchen that needed to do something to keep the lights on when dining in was not an option. They had a Guy Fieri burger shop, a Mr. Beast Burger, and several others all sharing a kitchen for delivery only. Many of the other, traditionally dine in only places around here opened ghost kichens to stay open. It has actually worked well and kept many cooks employed during 2020-2021.
In addition to the great answers given already, The New Yorker had a great explainer a few years back: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/our-ghost-kitchen-future
The concept means a commercial kitchen that only services delivery orders — no dine-in or even carry out customers go there, just delivery drivers for food delivery services.
There are different types of businesses/brands that use ghost kitchens — start-up independent restaurants that are trying to keep costs down and/or serve a particular niche; known chains that use them to expand delivery range and/or offer delivery without affecting flow of kitchen in restaurants serving in-person customers; known brands trying to expand business/lure new customers with off-shoot brands.
Fishtail kitchens grew fast as a concept in recent years due to COVID and shift to more delivery, less dining out/restaurant closures/limits for in-person dining.
A single ghost kitchen can serve multiple brands, offers cheaper real estate because they’re typically in more off then eaten path, industrial buildings compared to prime retail sports.
Let’s say famous YouTuber Mr. Beans wants to start up a restaurant only accessible through door dash or other food delivery apps. Where does he set up a place to have the food made? Well. McDoogles could always use more business. (Especially during the pandemic when ghost kitchens gained popularity.) So McDoogles decides that even though they don’t make beans like Mr. Beans wants, they certainly COULD right? They have the kitchen and staff for it. So Mr. Beans and McDoogles partner up. Mr. Beans gets them the ingredients they need. McDoogles makes the food, and Mr. Beans sells the food through Door Dash. All without anyone ever knowing that their delicious Mr. Beans beans are being made in a McDoogles restaurant.
Ghost kitchens work by having digital orders (via DoorDash or Uber Eats in the US) for different restaurant concepts (e.g. Wendy’s or Burger King) flow into a ghost kitchen rather than their standalone stores. The food is then produced and packaged as if it came from a standalone restaurant concept (with Burger King ingredients in a BK bag and wrapping). Some ghost kitchens will even have the exact equipment as the restaurant concept to create product consistency.
Ideally, this kitchen is placed in a spot where the final mile for delivery drivers to customers is not too far. The delivery drivers are usually the only ones that interact with the ghost kitchen.
This works because the labor can be shared between concepts, and brands can capture sales from delivery without screwing over their existing store employees with extra work.
The concept is really simple. Pretend you had a kitchen but only wanted to make donuts from 6am to 10am. The rest of the day, you really aren’t using the kitchen, it’s just going to waste. So then you rent out the kitchen to Tom to make extra money, who want’s to run a sandwich shop for lunch time. then at night, Patricia wants to set up a Pizza shop. You all use the same equipment, but don’t really have the ability to customize the inside of the restaurant because the theming would be way different…. So instead you leave names off, hence the “Ghost kitchen” because there are no real signs or remnants of your kitchen when you are not cooking.
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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