Maybe it's just an irrational, emotion-based response, but I really prefer to order delivery from bricks and mortar restaurants I know and can walk into, and where it feels like they have a strong stake in their long-term reputation.
I share your opinion. I never went to a restaurant for a food alone. Environment, people working there, other guests are very important to me. This anonymous food delivery business is somehow scary. It got worse when I saw article about container kitchens in London: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo-d... I definitely don’t want such anonymous food, especially when it’s preparation conditions belong solely from people working there.
> It got worse when I saw article about container kitchens in London:
There's nothing new or scary about the concept of container kitchens. They've been used for catering, pop-up restaurants, disaster relief, etc for some time.
> especially when it’s preparation conditions belong solely from people working there
But that's most restaurants, considering that kitchens are usually separated from the customers.
As a point of comparison, I love eating out because I like trying new dishes or having foods that I might not be able to make at home, or just sometimes to be able to enjoy an evening without cooking. Still, I almost never go to restaurants these days because of the loud music that assaults my ears at nearly all of them. The environment is just completely intolerable. Having a delivery option means that there are far more options open to me than there would be otherwise, and I see the move toward these delivery only kitchens as a good thing- more places focused on making food rather than torturing their customers with acoustics that in most other settings would approach torture.
I know lots of people who feel the same way. Your comment made me wonder: now that people who don't like the sonic assault can still eat restaurant food, will restaurants make the noise even worse?
I think atmosphere / not being at home is still a big draw at restaurants. Maybe there aren't as many quiet ones out there as we'd like but they are out there.
One problem: when I hear "quiet atmosphere" I suspect that they're probably good at one or two banal dishes and seriously deficient at anything else. There are multiple "quiet atmosphere" restaurants in my area where I will never again order anything but the fried pork tenderloin sandwich. That's not because I particularly like fried pork tenderloin sandwiches, but rather because these places have either disgusted or sickened (or both!) me when I've ordered more "exotic" fare like salad, vegetables, pasta, or steak.
That's one perspective. But the other is that cloud kitchens drastically lower the barriers to entry by removing nearly all of the upfront capital costs.
That gives young chefs more freedom to innovate and pursue their own vision. Rather than conforming to the risk-averse demands of capital investors.
On an ecosystem level it also drastically increases the competitiveness of the local market. This may be overlooked by the predominately NYC/SF/LA crowd here, but many locales in American don't have many great restaurants. Lower barriers to entry increase competitive intensity.
If you live in Peoria, IL and want to have Ethiopian for dinner, it's probably not a question of choosing an already established high-quality brick-and-mortar. It's most likely a mediocre low-quality monopoly, or maybe even no Ethiopian whatsoever.
If there was a way to WeWork a kitchen while still being able to have a health inspector validate everything's in order, that would be fine. The article only briefly touches on that, and I'm not sure how a grubhub/doordash would validate (or if they care). Until that's explained I'll stay away from the possibility of a fly-by-night restaurant.
I understand your concern and it is valid, because as it stands there are plenty of ways to get around the heath inspection issue.
However I suspect that this model will take off and the delivery apps will start to address your concerns.
The southwest model (ever minute the plane isn't flying were loosing money) applies to kitchen space as well. Depending on your locale there is a lot of it out there being underutilized. Lots of places require that food trucks have (and many need) a physical location. Having that be in an out of the way place and NOT having to a retail side is a massive savings as the location can be "shared" and potentially come at a massive savings. Leveraging these same places for delivery only businesses (or in the case of one local truck a delivery option near the kitchen they use) has been a boon to all involved.
I'll be happy when it gets there. My city has a pretty solid food truck market, and their food is usually unique and delicious. But I've also seen an increase on grubhub of generic shop names like "Flatbread" and "Fried Chicken" with addresses that don't seem to make sense.
I mean, yeah. This sounds great on paper. I will be interested to see how it plays out in the real world. So many of these things that are supposed to lower barriers to entry and give access to less advantaged players seem to instead get exploited by the same big companies as ways to lower costs and evade accountability. I wonder in five years what percentage of these will truly be run by young innovative chefs who don't have startup capital vs. people who don't actually care about the quality of food but see a chance for a faster buck. Maybe I'm just having a cynical Friday....
I just don't do delivery. I don't know why, it's always rubbed me the wrong way.
IMO, if I'm lazy I'd rather just go out or pull something out of the freezer. I've always lived close to something that I can walk to, who will take care of all of the cleanup for the same cost as delivery.
Even living in a rather rural area, I can still walk to four restaurants, three of which are exceptional. In addition, I can walk to three ice cream places and one seasonal food truck.
Most food doesn't deliver well. It basically steams itself in the packaging. Anything that wasn't meant to be soft ends up that way. I get mad when I see fries even available for delivery, though I hear the big potato companies are hard at work on the solution.
I've debated doing a ghost kitchen based entirely on "what foods deliver well".
If you're interested, NPR did a shallow dive into the frie coating research by Big Potato. According to them, the problem is solved.
> French fries don't age well. They're crispy and delicious right out of the fryer, but they get colder and soggier the faster and farther they get from the kitchen. That's fine for eating at a fast-food restaurant, and okay maybe for the drive through.
> But on-demand app-enabled delivery is changing how, when, and where we eat french fries. And massive multi-billion dollar potato companies, like Lamb Weston, are worried about that.
> On today's show, a team of potato scientists sets out to save the french fry.
I feel like these rental kitchens are like food trucks & stands, a low cost way to startup a business and test a restaurant. If they are popular, they can often graduate to a full on restaurant location too.
Most ghost kitchens have that. I mean, you can't sit down and eat there, but they are more than happy to have you order it from them directly and skip the 30% fee Uber Eats charges. Most of them have something like ChowNow (which you can order from off of a Google search without ever even going to their website).
Also many of them are food trucks, so they're still people you know if you're into the local food scene.
There are a few "restaurants" near me that don't have any brick-and-mortar presence. The food they offer suspiciously looks like what you could get at your grocery's frozen food section. I'm not a fan of this model as I've seen it so far. You don't need much, you can have the Domino's style food counter and a stool (aka don't eat here, go outside), but not having a real storefront rubs me the wrong way.
A big reason for that is that they probably are made the same way; an automated factory line that has no way of fitting into a strip mall lot can easily do so in the warehouse district; after all a factory is architecturally a warehouse with machinery inside. As such I can see an incentive to take a factory setup for frozen $2 burritos and strip out the flash-freezer, leaving you with the perfect ghost kitchen setup for "El Cactus Organica"
I feel like you'd never get the volume out of a factory location (even a centralized one) to justify the production capacity of industrial food production equipment, at least not as it exists today. There are some startups that seem to at least be trying to bridge this gap with smaller-scale food production automation.
I'm not surprised at all given the people supposed to verify restaurants' applications are most likely the same monkeys that run their customer service (outsourced of course, what a surprise).
Doesn't seem too strange in the sense that I know of bakeries that while they have a small storefront, actually in the back make a variety things to serve local restaurants, and even rent some or all of the kitchen out to restaurants and caterers.
Their bakery is really very little of what we think we see and in many ways just little storefront on a kitchen that does a lot of work for other things including delivery ... to another restaurant. Not too strange to think of it going straight to someone's front door.
I like to cook but I really don't get the time or space. I can see that kitchen in the back ... man it's nice.
These are game changers in constrained cities. My area had zero healthy options until dark kitchens opened up like 5 options this past year. Amazing for us.
They are called commissaries, not 'cloud kitchens', not 'ghost kitchens'. Commissaries are not new, they are used all the time in the restaurant industry. If you've had food from a food truck or caterer, then that food was likely prepared in a commissary.
Giving hip new names to old tech is not doing anyone a favor. Preparing food in a commissary is a sound, established business model. The idea doesn't need any fluff, delivering food prepared in a commissary, rather than a restaurant, makes perfect sense. The benefits are, lower real estate costs, shared labor, fewer stops for delivery personnel, and the ability to quickly change food offerings & experiment.
"113751. “Commissary” means a food facility that services mobile food facilities, mobile support units, or vending machines where any of the following occur:
(a) Food, containers, or supplies are stored.
(b) Food is prepared or prepackaged for sale or service at other locations. (c) Utensils are cleaned.
(d) Liquid and solid wastes are disposed, or potable water is obtained."
The idea of a 'cloud kitchen' or a 'ghost kitchen' is different from a commissary kitchen, and the terminology doesn't help make this distinction. 'Cloud restaurant' or 'ghost restaurant' would be more appropriate, as the "restaurant" is the ethereal part, not the kitchen. A commissary kitchen can act as the kitchen for a 'cloud restaurant', but the restaurant itself is more a product of branding and food curation that only lives in the minds of the creator and the customer, and this is enabled by decoupling the distribution channel from the production. Food trucks and caterers bring food directly to their customers, and usually have a more personal relationship with them.
They are not the same, but ghost kitchens do operate out of a commissary. A commissary is a shared use kitchen. A ghost kitchen (which admittedly would probably be better called a ghost restaurant) is basically just a delivery/pickup-only restaurant. It may operate out of a commissary or its own space.
The Food Corridor is a (very terrible) piece of software that allows bookings for kitchen space, so they probably focus on the ones that work from public kitchens for that reason, but lots of them have dedicated kitchens or rent from a church hall or VFW.
Got it. We just finished a cohort of food business interviews to help identify and fix these issues. You should see some changes to the booking system and mobile enhancement releases in the coming months. If you ever want to talk to us directly and provide feedback, we are open to it. hello@thefoodcorridor.com
Great. Thinking about it, I should apologize for "terrible". That's an exaggeration to be sure. And also, I suspect some of the problems we have are our kitchen's implementation.
I feel like this business model (which I like) is too reliant on the health of the gig-delivery ecosystem, which I get the feeling is propped up by VC money subsidizing delivery costs. Once the funding dries up and the deliveries stop flowing as easily, these types of kitchens might be in danger.
I agree with you, but there are entire industries thriving propped up on subsidies.
I am curious if this will really work long them, but I'm actually somewhat optimistic that there will be enough momentum to keep the industry around until its successor arrives.
seems like convenience stores could be a reasonable distribution channel. japan does that, i believe? and US stores usually have similarly produced (but less tasty) food.
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought I heard somewhere along the line that Uber actually makes money on Eats, am I mistaken?
Also as a separate point, I worked for an on-demand food startup, and I remember our founders talking about a local entrepreneur they knew who rented a single commissary, was operating white labeled brands on the delivery platforms, and was highly profitable.
Almost makes me think the delivery platforms could have a Shopify-type effect for traditional restaurateurs and it will be interesting to see the business models that unfold as a result.
Without knowing the details of their business, it seems likely that Uber is happy to lose money to get a decent foothold in a market, and then slowly change priorities from growth to profitability.
I noticed today that the people who used to hand out $20 off your first Uber Eats coupons in my town are now down to $15... presumably part of this process.
A successful cloud kitchen will be operating many restaurants from a single location, ideally with enough demand to justify full-time deliveries from that single location. This cuts out the need for the gig worker. Instead of having to have people distributed around a city so that they can pick up food from location A and deliver it to location B, location A is now fixed and you can have a single driver, or drivers delivering from that specific cloud kitchen.
It really never occurred to me that they would employ their own delivery drivers in today's economy, but I guess if local pizzerias can do it, why not other restaurants with significant volume?
I think this is a valid point. The thing that makes it a bit different from traditional gig workers is that food prep requires formal training (food handling/safety, knife skills, time/temp, etc.).
Your point about VC money propping it up is right on. We saw this happen with box/meal kit companies that couldn't achieve realistic unit economics in the food supply chain and instead were paying for customer acquisition in the form of free meals. Most have folded but some are still dying on the vine.
Food delivery has been a profitable industry for decades, and there always have been restaurants that do a majority of delivery business. This is just an optimization of that. I don't think it's particularly tied to the gig economy.
The difference is that conventional food delivery is a restaurant hiring teenagers to deliver and pays them cash. There's basically zero initial investment involved other than a couple of bikes and the owner makes a profit off every delivery.
Doordash & co have raised millions of investor money which not only do they have to pay back but also provide unrealistic returns, which isn't really possible with such a physical service where expenses and profits scale mostly linearly (see WeWork which promised tech-company-style returns despite being a physical business and how it all ended).
I'm not defending Doordash here, I'm just saying that the general concept of running a space optimized for cooking food for delivery is solid, could easily be profitable, and mostly already exists in the form of existing restaurants that are optimized for delivery (like pizza places that don't even have tables). I live in Manhattan and the amount of food being ordered in every day is unreal. Shockingly even the Taco Bell near me does more volume in delivery than in eat-in or to-go -- and they don't even run any delivery services themselves! It's all third party!
It's really a way to exploit suckers who "want to run a restaurant". They're in an awful position in a shared kitchen. The landlord, wholesale food service provider, delivery service, and order flow source are the same. The "restaurant owner" is thus an gig worker, easily replaced.
The first "Doordash Kitchens" location is near me. It has rows of metal shelving where people come out of the non-visible kitchen and put packages on delivery racks, to be picked up by waiting drivers in their waiting room.
They're not quite organized enough for it to be a drive-through operation for the drivers. This works for Doordash because Doordash doesn't pay for driver waiting time. If the drivers were employees, which is probably happening in California next year, the next driver would take the next outgoing package, regardless of destination, to optimize driver utilization.
So... just like Upwork is providing an opportunity to 'developer entrepreneurs' who want to code but not handle the other aspects of contract work?
Usually platforms like this are rigged so nobody comes out on top except the company providing the platform. Maybe there are awesome chefs working in Doordash food factories but it's probably because they just don't have any better options.
The level of quality for cloud kitchens (only talking about the area of London I used to order from) is not the level of quality you'd expect from a chef entrepreneur.
These are "food factories"appealing to a different demographic, but still "gig economy" type shops shooting for the lower common denominator.
A successful chef creating delivery meals is easily replaced and I think that’s the model.
Ala Amazon, the “cloud kitchen” is the market maker and can simply ape what sells. Vegan Pho doing really well? Spin up “What the Pho?” uptown fellas!
The kinds of small time operators likely to lease space and time from a cloud kitchen will have no grounds to demand a non-compete. See controversies in au courant “food halls” happening now for examples.
It does seem like the operator is more of a line cook than a restaurant owner. Where it could be valuable is for folks looking to test recipes and menus on customers before opening a brick and mortar. The delivery aspect is going to greatly impact quality though and may not translate well to a sit-down restaurant anyway.
It's an interesting point about the drivers. It does make sense to make it first in/first out as the food is ready.
Commissary/co-op kitchens already accomplish this, without wrecking the food trucks themselves. In places where trucks are already common, cloud kitchens do nothing but raise rents on the same spaces that trucks already try to afford.
The data mining angles of cloud kitchens, particularly around neighborhood demographics and real estate valuation, need much more critical examination than they're getting.
I wouldn’t classify the owner as a gig worker. They own the customer-facing brand and other IP. Much of the customer data they likely share with delivery services, but not the kitchen (of course, vertical integration is a future possibility.) What this does is shift the necessary owner competencies away from operations and more towards marketing (and chef skills.) Which seems like a trend, as the same statement could be made for many different industries that have been heavily disrupted, e.g music, podcasts, book publishing.
"What this does is shift the necessary owner competencies away from operations and more towards marketing."
But those are the hard parts of running a business. So is this for people who want to play business, or who are fooling themselves that this is a shortcut to getting rich?
Some wannabe restaurant owners are better at operations (setting up a kitchen) and others are better at marketing (bringing customer orders in). Cloud kitchens make the restaurant business a bit less appealing to the former and a bit more appealing to the latter. There’s nothing inherently sacred about the balance between these two competencies.
"On prepared foods — which quickly became the bulk of the food hall’s business — Donaldson’s company was raking in as much as 30 percent. (The current structure, according to Donaldson, is a flat rate of around 30 percent of sales for all vendors.) Even if they made no sales, stalls paid at minimum $4,500 each month "
As a concept this seems to make a lot of sense to me. A restaurant actually seems like the worst place to prepare food meant for delivery. I think of my local taco place which usually has a line of Door Dash, Postmates, and Uber Eats drivers out the door while people are trying to order.
I am curious how this article relates to Cloud Kitchens[1] the Travis Kalanick startup because I am skeptical they arrived at the same name out of coincidence.
It's pretty annoying when you walk into a place like Chipotle and they're making five online orders in front of you. Like, I'm standing right here. I put way more effort into doing business with you by making a physical presence. Please prioritize my order.
To flip that around, their customer acquisition costs for online orders is probably lower, and their customer retention for online orders could be higher too.
It's not ignoring. It's FIFO. How is that unfair? Just seems like an HNer's ego trip that someone ordered something before him and, gosh darnit, he can't even see them!
I disagree that it's an ego trip and I think many other people would feel equally inconvenienced. Is it slightly irrational? Sure. Were they there before me? Technically. But they clicked a button. I walked in. For that reason, I think I'm more valuable of a customer. We can virtue signal and pretend we don't have egos, but I'll readily admit mine in this scenario.
Saying it's "just FIFO" is, well, too logical. Because if it were simply logic, I wouldn't feel inconvenienced. Feelings defy logic. The person who ordered online isn't going to notice the two or three minutes, since they aren't standing in line, but I do. And the person who has to wait the food, is actually get paid to do so, as a courrier. I am not. So maybe the FIFO should account for that, is what I'm suggesting.
At my Chipotle, they do. It may vary based on location. People have disagreed with me, but I still believe it's poor customer service to ignore your customers.
> A restaurant actually seems like the worst place to prepare food meant for delivery.
A restaurant... which already has all the equipment and overhead for making food... and which has excess capacity that's already paid for... and even someone whose job it is to answer the phone...
I can't even imagine how you think this is the worst place. It's literally the best, most efficient place in terms of taking advantage of excess capacity.
So your local taco place has delivery people waiting around. Doesn't exactly seem like a major life inconvenience, does it? And taco places have had delivery people hanging around long before the apps. You just used a thing called a phone. Delivery has been around for decades. It's not new.
Seems to me that many of the comments are failing to compare this model to the common alternative, which is a public facing restaurant. The failure rate of those is at least ~60%, so is this "cloud" model likely to be worse than that? I doubt it.
As a model, I think the customer here is not so much a food buyer but a restaurant starter and that is a bottomless well. This concept is a natural outgrowth of the current trend in quasi-legal "instagram restaurants" . It also meshes well with the fickle appetites and food trends of modern day. A cronut kitchen can sell out for 6 months and then fade into a ramen burger for another 6 months, all from the same physical kitchen.
I think that it is more sustainable than the food-truck -> sit-down-restaurant strategy that hasn't worked for more than a handful of entrepreneurs. American's love to eat a cornucopia of tastes and dishes but we absolutely hate to pay more than a nickel for it. The underlying cost structure of the cloud kitchen is more amenable to that sentiment.
I don't buy a lot of food online. If you don't have a storefront, I won't know you exist. These dark kitchens won't even let you pick up the food yourself, from my understanding. I have to go through a middle man. So, you've already lost me as a customer unless I happen to have your specific food delivery app installed -- and that's a pretty fragmented market.
Because of the price of real estate here in Toronto you can find a hybrid of the two.
There's a row (for Torontonians I'm speaking about Geary Ave) where you can find industrial kitchens for some of the city's best foods that also serve out the front. You just have to not mind the stripped down atmosphere or taking your fresh, hand-made pasta to go. Funny enough, I don't think many of those places even allow online orders/delivery.
The current opaque way that ride matching is done where drivers cannot know the destination before accepting a ride, creates an environment where providers (drivers) are increasingly using gaming techniques to get around this restriction, to the detriment of customers. An example of this is something that commonly happens at airports, where a driver will accept a ride and then wait around for customer to cancel if the trip isn't to the driver's liking.
Similarly, on Amazon marketplace the problems with counterfeit goods etc... are well documented, where a marketplace of sellers is gaming the system at the detriment of consumers.
I can see the same type of gaming systems potentially happening here if there is opacity in the market information for both suppliers and customers. For example a kitchen could replace organic ingredients for non-organic ones and consumers wouldn't know the difference. Or if an order is accepted and turns out it is too large or too small they would delay fulfillment forcing a consumer to restart the process.
As with all of the gig-economy work and poorly regulated markets generally, it has some consistent patterns where incentives for low prices drive a race to the bottom and I don't think that's something I'd want from my food.
It might be worth noting that CloudKitchens is Travis Kalanick's new startup. So I would expect that the vision he brought to cab/rideshare is the same here, but in the food market, using UberEats as first point of proof that it can be successful already.
> An example of this is something that commonly happens at airports, where a driver will accept a ride and then wait around for customer to cancel if the trip isn't to the driver's liking.
How is this possible? I thought the driver didn't get to see the destination until they actually pick up the rider.
Solid idea, I wonder about what type of scale makes an entire kitchen facility viable. I've known many chefs who were able to make a small catering career with under 5 employees, does a cloud kitchen help them out or are they better off cooking out of the home and/or a food cart?
I've heard them with the name "dark kitchens", but it was already common (at least I'veeen seen it already in Italy): tiny storefronts where most of the food is made for delivery
They might or might not be on popular delivery apps, some of them take orders only by phone, some rely on gig workers, some others are just family businesses
The most effective marketing materials, apart being on glovo/deliveroo/justeat etc. are flyers left in the mailbox
In Italy the ones that started it were kebab and pizza places
I love this idea. I don't understand why, in this day and age, I need a kitchen in my house. I'm not a chef. I don't have a wood shop or an auto shop in my house. I don't grow my own food or have my own cows. Cooking for myself seems like an old fashioned kind of thing to me.
I enjoy cooking. Sometimes I cook by myself, sometimes I cook with my GF, so it's a couples activity. Sometimes I go full engineer and I measure everything with a kitchen scale (WTF is a "tbsp"?). Sometimes I feel more creative and go off piste, with varying results.
Cooking for yourself is also cheaper, healthier, and gives you full control over the inputs, the process, and the output.
Maybe it is old-fashioned. Then again, I am slowly acquiring woodworking tools (and leatherworking tools, and book restoration tools, and...) so maybe it's just a matter of personal taste. I've recently realized I'm a craftsman; this has both helped my understand my widely varying hobbies, and guiding me towards new things that interest me.
Hahaha, thanks, but I do know what tbsps and tsps are :) What I meant is that some days I need the extra precision -- is the flour supposed to just cover the tbsp, or stack as much of it as humanly possible? Just tell me how many grams of flour! -- and some other days I'm OK with going with whatever feels more or less right.
> I don't understand why, in this day and age, I need a kitchen in my house.
By that logic, you could remove pretty much everything from your home, apart from a bed, bathroom, table and laptop.
But I can also think of two concrete reasons why you would want to cook for yourself (in addition to training a potentially valuable skill or treating it as a leisure activity)
- Cooking for guests: In some situations, you want to treat guests with a restaurant-like experience at home. In such a situation, takeout may be either impractical or inappropriate. For social reasons, it may be important that the food is prepared by yourself and not commissioned to someone else.
- Controlling ingredients: When ordering takeout (or eating at a restaurant), the restaurant is in full control of ingredients and will choose them in a way that is optimal for the restaurant - but not necessarily optimal for you. E.g., they may choose ingredients that taste well but are unhealthy it may choose ingredients produced under problematic conditions.
> But I can also think of two concrete reasons why you would want to cook for yourself
The third one is cost. You can essentially always beat the restaurant on cost, often by a lot, due to their overhead and desire to yield a profit for the owner. At home you supply the labor and eat the profit (so to speak). Your typical family will find it dramatically less expensive to eat in than to eat out.
Food from a restaurant is way more expensive than prepping and cooking yourself at home. Add a doordash markup/delivery fee/tip on top of that, multiply it by a family of four and you’re not too far away from that $100.
A meal that takes an hour of actively cooking is a very complicated/fancy meal. Ten to twenty minutes is more realistic for an ordinary weeknight meal, and a simple meal (eg pasta with sauce) is just a few minutes’ work.
Here in Helsinki there are a lot of small studios for rent - typically to either students, or single "professionals".
Sizes range between 15 and 30 square meters, and a lot of them have a sink, a small refrigerator, and a microwave. Nothing else. The "kitchen area" is literally a tiny corner, or niche, of the property.
With no oven, no hob, and no real storage space, often just a single cupboard for cups/plates/instant meals.
I cannot imagine living in such a place, because I enjoy baking bread, making my own pizzas, etc. On the other hand they're very cheap to live in and if you're a student I guess you can eat a lot of takeaways, or get your calories in liquid-form..
Better, tastier, cheaper, nice mental workout, great mix between science and art, helps a lot with dates and seduction.
The problem why home cooking sucks is that people have no idea what good kitchen equipment looks and performs like and buy expensive crap. They also fail to invest the time needed to get the basic techniques right.
Could you elaborate more about the equipment and provide some examples? I’m curious.
I’ve recently contributed to refurbishing the kitchen in my rental (it went from a dump to a pretty nice kitchen with brand new - still consumer-grade - equipment) and would like to know how pro equipment would help and where to start (let’s say I don’t have the budget for a full commercial kitchen - which parts should I prioritise first?).
People don't have good chef knives and don't know how to sharpen them, they also tend to overspend grossly on them and still not get something with good performance. A good knife is thinly ground, with slight convex, tapers towards the tip, have a nice usable flat part and very nice curve towards the tip, made of easy to sharpen stainless steel. Don't obsess over HRC - 59-60 is enough.
If you don't have the budget - victorinox and mora have very nice cheap chef knives that can take a great edge but need some elbow grease to grind them a bit. And they cost like 30 euro.
Also get a beater knife - something cheap that you can use for rougher tasks that won't cry if it chips or breaks.
Consumer grade burners - both gas and electric are underpowered. A pro grade 3.5 Kw induction hob is a beast - I will take one of these vs a whole 60x60 cm with 4 burners the most powerful of which tops at 2kw. For gas - where I live there are some 7kw single burners. Once again beasts. Never used gas, so not sure how low their simmer is, but there should be something decent.
Also consumer grade mixers are rarely good enough, but their top models are probably more expensive than what you can get for commercial use. A professional electrolux be5 planetary is 350 w and still it can outmix something consumer that is 1250 w (it is expensive though, but build like a tank, just example of the wattage wars)
For ovens the only thing you need is raw power and thermal stability - ignore all bells and whistles (except properly executed steam, but those tend to cost as much as a combi oven). There are some self cleaning ovens that can be hacked to bake pizza in them, but it is dangerous and voids the warranty.
In germany there are very popular right now gas infrared top mini broilers 800C that can put insane crust on a steak. And cost 100 eur. This combined with sous vide is amazing meat all the time.
A good thing is that in the last years we actually start to see some good stuff being sized down to consumers, without sacrificing performance.
Here’s the part I’ve never quite understood (perhaps because I’m not a budding chef or restaurateur):
Isn’t the whole point/dream of becoming a professional chef, opening up a restaurant, etc. to have the experience of running your own space, designing it, building a menu, meeting your diners, watching their faces, seeing the lines form outside, getting a reputation, winning a Michelin Star, AND cooking some great food?
It feels like the whole model of the ghost/cloud/whatever kitchen removes 99% of that joy/misery/experience and strips it down to just making food and reading online reviews (good or bad) from people with no personal connection to you whatsoever.
I’m sure I’m missing something here, so please help me out, but it seems like this business model is terrific for the operator of the cloud kitchen and terrific for the delivery apps but turns the chefs into little more than assembly line factory workers.
The owner (of the restaurant concept) and the chef are often the same person in operations like this. It might take less capital to get off the ground than a full-scale restaurant. Almost certainly less, considering you have to do all the same things in a restaurant, plus hire and decorate front of house. By corollary, there's less at risk by trying a cloud kitchen first. It's a way to fail inexpensively.
More generally, most people don't have the luxury to simply do whatever they would optimally prefer to. They generally have to trade off preferences and pragmatics. Dreams don't put food on the table. So if there's a niche, in evolution or business, something is going to fill it eventually.
It's orders of magnitude less. Where I live, in a very cheap part of the country, I could buy a failed restaurant with enough of the pieces in place to not have to build out (permitting is a nightmare in the food world) for let's say $50k. That'd be a bad place in a bad area with most of the appliances gone. But I'd still have a hood and sprinklers and plumbing, so I'd be able to sink another $50k in and have a kitchen running before too long. If I wanted a bad failed restaurant somewhere that might actually bring foot traffic, double that cost.
Or I can rent a commissary kitchen for $18/hr, plus $100-$200/mo or so in dry and refrigerated storage, and scale from there. I could get started in a week.
To most chefs, this is the difference between "I can afford this now" and "I will literally never in my entire life be able to afford this."
I think this is right. The barriers to entry are lower and they have time to perfect menus and recipes. That said, the delivery element changes the way a chef is going to think about food. I see this model as being super helpful for food trucks (that have already have a customer following) to extend their sales during the down months or bad weather days.
#1 the dream of being a professional painter is to have your works in the Louvre, but that doesn't stop you from enjoying your small gallery openings at the beginning of your career. You have to start somewhere.
#2 Opening your own restaurant is hella expensive and takes fucking forever. It's hard to explain the hell that is building a restaurant, and I don't even live in NY or SF where it's worse. You can get a product launched in a software company for less. The upside to a software company is a whole lot bigger though, so there's a lot less investment in restaurants. And I don't know if you know many chefs, but they tend to not have much money.
#3 there are all sorts of kitchens you're not thinking of where the space is rarely utilized, or frequently underutilized. VFW, church, and other social halls. Small food producers. Etc. This is money wasted to the owner. It's a win-win when those places get food trucks and ghost kitchens.
#4 a ghost kitchen isn't that dissimilar to owning a food truck. In fact a lot of them come from food trucks who have to operate out of some commissary anyway and want the stability of selling stuff year round.
#5 You're still doing most of the things in a ghost kitchen you do in any other restaurant, you just don't have tables. You still have a brand. You still develop a menu. You still manage employees. You still source ingredients. Etc. You just put stuff in a box instead of a plate and don't have a front of house (which, frankly, most chefs suck at anyway) to deal with.
The entire food industry is a bad business model for most of the people involved somehow.
I've working in restaurants for 11 years in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Portland, OR. They only touched on the biggest benefit which is being able to negotiate the lowest prices for wholesale food items. If they have single dish washing facility and butcher on site, they will do even better. This is a great idea because most people have no clue how to run a restaurant even though they might be a good cook.
I would expect the Bangladeshi and Sikh community to metaphorically eat the vc's lunch if they organized. Or the contingent of Mexicans who run almost all US kichens by repute (ie, unionised and form collectives to do this better and cheaper). Sikhs cook for thousands every week at the temple, they have volume down pat. Bangladeshi are the mexicans of Indian restaurant food worldwide, it often doesn't matter what subregion it says over the door, they're doing the cooking.
Nobody here seems to have heard of Rebel Foods from India, which is (as per its own claim) the largest cloud kitchen company in the world. They now have their own 'brands' across multiple cuisines, leveraging the delivery services provided by Zomato and Swiggy (both unicorns).
Ref :
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/rebel-foods-which-operates...https://rebelfoods.co/
In a few years if this takes off we can get all our meals from cloud kitchens. I like that I don't have to drive to the grocery store or restaurant, and instead, they drive to me.
If delivery gets optimized enough that it's no cheaper than making food at home then we can start doing nutrition trials like never before.
We forget that food is fuel. We know how to make it taste good, but it's an important aspect of our health. A lot of restaurants already allow selecting vegam, or gluten-free. Ideally, we would be able to try all sorts of things:
1) Select an elimination diet plan and since all meals are delivered you're more likely to stick to it. Different foods will get cut out and you can figure out if there's an allergy you're not aware of
2) If you're eating healthy, it's more trackable. It'll be possible to get a monthly email that tells you what nutrients you got. You can get blood tests to see if the nutrients are actually being absorbed.
3) Trackable food means I can pay less for insurance if I'm eating healthy. Right now nutrition is a very messy field. Some some vegan is better, some argue the paleo thing is best. How about we solve this with insurance? These companies will effectively make bets on your health outcomes based on what you're eating. Insurance companies that make bad bets will go out of business. We can get the preventative medicine we've always wanted because the cost of bad decisions will be reflected in your finances right away.
4) It might be easier to start a restaurant that serves a niche group since you get some benefits that come from economies of scale.
128 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadThere's nothing new or scary about the concept of container kitchens. They've been used for catering, pop-up restaurants, disaster relief, etc for some time.
> especially when it’s preparation conditions belong solely from people working there
But that's most restaurants, considering that kitchens are usually separated from the customers.
That gives young chefs more freedom to innovate and pursue their own vision. Rather than conforming to the risk-averse demands of capital investors.
On an ecosystem level it also drastically increases the competitiveness of the local market. This may be overlooked by the predominately NYC/SF/LA crowd here, but many locales in American don't have many great restaurants. Lower barriers to entry increase competitive intensity.
If you live in Peoria, IL and want to have Ethiopian for dinner, it's probably not a question of choosing an already established high-quality brick-and-mortar. It's most likely a mediocre low-quality monopoly, or maybe even no Ethiopian whatsoever.
However I suspect that this model will take off and the delivery apps will start to address your concerns.
The southwest model (ever minute the plane isn't flying were loosing money) applies to kitchen space as well. Depending on your locale there is a lot of it out there being underutilized. Lots of places require that food trucks have (and many need) a physical location. Having that be in an out of the way place and NOT having to a retail side is a massive savings as the location can be "shared" and potentially come at a massive savings. Leveraging these same places for delivery only businesses (or in the case of one local truck a delivery option near the kitchen they use) has been a boon to all involved.
I just don't do delivery. I don't know why, it's always rubbed me the wrong way.
IMO, if I'm lazy I'd rather just go out or pull something out of the freezer. I've always lived close to something that I can walk to, who will take care of all of the cleanup for the same cost as delivery.
Even living in a rather rural area, I can still walk to four restaurants, three of which are exceptional. In addition, I can walk to three ice cream places and one seasonal food truck.
I've debated doing a ghost kitchen based entirely on "what foods deliver well".
> French fries don't age well. They're crispy and delicious right out of the fryer, but they get colder and soggier the faster and farther they get from the kitchen. That's fine for eating at a fast-food restaurant, and okay maybe for the drive through.
> But on-demand app-enabled delivery is changing how, when, and where we eat french fries. And massive multi-billion dollar potato companies, like Lamb Weston, are worried about that.
> On today's show, a team of potato scientists sets out to save the french fry.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-o...
Also many of them are food trucks, so they're still people you know if you're into the local food scene.
Their bakery is really very little of what we think we see and in many ways just little storefront on a kitchen that does a lot of work for other things including delivery ... to another restaurant. Not too strange to think of it going straight to someone's front door.
I like to cook but I really don't get the time or space. I can see that kitchen in the back ... man it's nice.
They are called commissaries, not 'cloud kitchens', not 'ghost kitchens'. Commissaries are not new, they are used all the time in the restaurant industry. If you've had food from a food truck or caterer, then that food was likely prepared in a commissary.
Giving hip new names to old tech is not doing anyone a favor. Preparing food in a commissary is a sound, established business model. The idea doesn't need any fluff, delivering food prepared in a commissary, rather than a restaurant, makes perfect sense. The benefits are, lower real estate costs, shared labor, fewer stops for delivery personnel, and the ability to quickly change food offerings & experiment.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commissary
"113751. “Commissary” means a food facility that services mobile food facilities, mobile support units, or vending machines where any of the following occur: (a) Food, containers, or supplies are stored. (b) Food is prepared or prepackaged for sale or service at other locations. (c) Utensils are cleaned. (d) Liquid and solid wastes are disposed, or potable water is obtained."
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CEH/DFDCS/CDPH%20Document%2...
The Food Corridor is a (very terrible) piece of software that allows bookings for kitchen space, so they probably focus on the ones that work from public kitchens for that reason, but lots of them have dedicated kitchens or rent from a church hall or VFW.
I am curious if this will really work long them, but I'm actually somewhat optimistic that there will be enough momentum to keep the industry around until its successor arrives.
Also as a separate point, I worked for an on-demand food startup, and I remember our founders talking about a local entrepreneur they knew who rented a single commissary, was operating white labeled brands on the delivery platforms, and was highly profitable.
Almost makes me think the delivery platforms could have a Shopify-type effect for traditional restaurateurs and it will be interesting to see the business models that unfold as a result.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/technology/ubereats-food-...
I noticed today that the people who used to hand out $20 off your first Uber Eats coupons in my town are now down to $15... presumably part of this process.
In Q3 Eats EBITDA was negative $315m while Rides was positive $630m.
Your point about VC money propping it up is right on. We saw this happen with box/meal kit companies that couldn't achieve realistic unit economics in the food supply chain and instead were paying for customer acquisition in the form of free meals. Most have folded but some are still dying on the vine.
Doordash & co have raised millions of investor money which not only do they have to pay back but also provide unrealistic returns, which isn't really possible with such a physical service where expenses and profits scale mostly linearly (see WeWork which promised tech-company-style returns despite being a physical business and how it all ended).
The first "Doordash Kitchens" location is near me. It has rows of metal shelving where people come out of the non-visible kitchen and put packages on delivery racks, to be picked up by waiting drivers in their waiting room.
They're not quite organized enough for it to be a drive-through operation for the drivers. This works for Doordash because Doordash doesn't pay for driver waiting time. If the drivers were employees, which is probably happening in California next year, the next driver would take the next outgoing package, regardless of destination, to optimize driver utilization.
Saying a successful chef is easily replaced is a bit insulting.
Usually platforms like this are rigged so nobody comes out on top except the company providing the platform. Maybe there are awesome chefs working in Doordash food factories but it's probably because they just don't have any better options.
These are "food factories"appealing to a different demographic, but still "gig economy" type shops shooting for the lower common denominator.
Ala Amazon, the “cloud kitchen” is the market maker and can simply ape what sells. Vegan Pho doing really well? Spin up “What the Pho?” uptown fellas!
The kinds of small time operators likely to lease space and time from a cloud kitchen will have no grounds to demand a non-compete. See controversies in au courant “food halls” happening now for examples.
It's an interesting point about the drivers. It does make sense to make it first in/first out as the food is ready.
The data mining angles of cloud kitchens, particularly around neighborhood demographics and real estate valuation, need much more critical examination than they're getting.
But those are the hard parts of running a business. So is this for people who want to play business, or who are fooling themselves that this is a shortcut to getting rich?
"On prepared foods — which quickly became the bulk of the food hall’s business — Donaldson’s company was raking in as much as 30 percent. (The current structure, according to Donaldson, is a flat rate of around 30 percent of sales for all vendors.) Even if they made no sales, stalls paid at minimum $4,500 each month "
Well, I guess that’s how rich people get richer. Rent seeking.
I am curious how this article relates to Cloud Kitchens[1] the Travis Kalanick startup because I am skeptical they arrived at the same name out of coincidence.
[1] https://www.cloudkitchens.com/
Saying it's "just FIFO" is, well, too logical. Because if it were simply logic, I wouldn't feel inconvenienced. Feelings defy logic. The person who ordered online isn't going to notice the two or three minutes, since they aren't standing in line, but I do. And the person who has to wait the food, is actually get paid to do so, as a courrier. I am not. So maybe the FIFO should account for that, is what I'm suggesting.
A restaurant... which already has all the equipment and overhead for making food... and which has excess capacity that's already paid for... and even someone whose job it is to answer the phone...
I can't even imagine how you think this is the worst place. It's literally the best, most efficient place in terms of taking advantage of excess capacity.
So your local taco place has delivery people waiting around. Doesn't exactly seem like a major life inconvenience, does it? And taco places have had delivery people hanging around long before the apps. You just used a thing called a phone. Delivery has been around for decades. It's not new.
As a model, I think the customer here is not so much a food buyer but a restaurant starter and that is a bottomless well. This concept is a natural outgrowth of the current trend in quasi-legal "instagram restaurants" . It also meshes well with the fickle appetites and food trends of modern day. A cronut kitchen can sell out for 6 months and then fade into a ramen burger for another 6 months, all from the same physical kitchen.
I think that it is more sustainable than the food-truck -> sit-down-restaurant strategy that hasn't worked for more than a handful of entrepreneurs. American's love to eat a cornucopia of tastes and dishes but we absolutely hate to pay more than a nickel for it. The underlying cost structure of the cloud kitchen is more amenable to that sentiment.
There's a row (for Torontonians I'm speaking about Geary Ave) where you can find industrial kitchens for some of the city's best foods that also serve out the front. You just have to not mind the stripped down atmosphere or taking your fresh, hand-made pasta to go. Funny enough, I don't think many of those places even allow online orders/delivery.
The concept just decouples a kitchen from a table.
Ok so this doesn't apply to you. There's plenty of other people who do.
Similarly, on Amazon marketplace the problems with counterfeit goods etc... are well documented, where a marketplace of sellers is gaming the system at the detriment of consumers.
I can see the same type of gaming systems potentially happening here if there is opacity in the market information for both suppliers and customers. For example a kitchen could replace organic ingredients for non-organic ones and consumers wouldn't know the difference. Or if an order is accepted and turns out it is too large or too small they would delay fulfillment forcing a consumer to restart the process.
As with all of the gig-economy work and poorly regulated markets generally, it has some consistent patterns where incentives for low prices drive a race to the bottom and I don't think that's something I'd want from my food.
It might be worth noting that CloudKitchens is Travis Kalanick's new startup. So I would expect that the vision he brought to cab/rideshare is the same here, but in the food market, using UberEats as first point of proof that it can be successful already.
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/the-next-big-bet-for-forme...
How is this possible? I thought the driver didn't get to see the destination until they actually pick up the rider.
They might or might not be on popular delivery apps, some of them take orders only by phone, some rely on gig workers, some others are just family businesses
The most effective marketing materials, apart being on glovo/deliveroo/justeat etc. are flyers left in the mailbox
In Italy the ones that started it were kebab and pizza places
Cooking for yourself is also cheaper, healthier, and gives you full control over the inputs, the process, and the output.
Maybe it is old-fashioned. Then again, I am slowly acquiring woodworking tools (and leatherworking tools, and book restoration tools, and...) so maybe it's just a matter of personal taste. I've recently realized I'm a craftsman; this has both helped my understand my widely varying hobbies, and guiding me towards new things that interest me.
Sometimes it's written as tblsp, tsp is teaspoon (5g/ml)
By that logic, you could remove pretty much everything from your home, apart from a bed, bathroom, table and laptop.
But I can also think of two concrete reasons why you would want to cook for yourself (in addition to training a potentially valuable skill or treating it as a leisure activity)
- Cooking for guests: In some situations, you want to treat guests with a restaurant-like experience at home. In such a situation, takeout may be either impractical or inappropriate. For social reasons, it may be important that the food is prepared by yourself and not commissioned to someone else.
- Controlling ingredients: When ordering takeout (or eating at a restaurant), the restaurant is in full control of ingredients and will choose them in a way that is optimal for the restaurant - but not necessarily optimal for you. E.g., they may choose ingredients that taste well but are unhealthy it may choose ingredients produced under problematic conditions.
The third one is cost. You can essentially always beat the restaurant on cost, often by a lot, due to their overhead and desire to yield a profit for the owner. At home you supply the labor and eat the profit (so to speak). Your typical family will find it dramatically less expensive to eat in than to eat out.
Now obviously the number of hours you can bill in a day and be sane has a limit...
Take a break, man.
Also cooking is time intensive only if you do it wrong. And actually a good way to fill some time while too tired from coding ...
Did you brush your teeth this morning? How much did you bill for that eh buddy?
Come on now.
Sizes range between 15 and 30 square meters, and a lot of them have a sink, a small refrigerator, and a microwave. Nothing else. The "kitchen area" is literally a tiny corner, or niche, of the property.
With no oven, no hob, and no real storage space, often just a single cupboard for cups/plates/instant meals.
I cannot imagine living in such a place, because I enjoy baking bread, making my own pizzas, etc. On the other hand they're very cheap to live in and if you're a student I guess you can eat a lot of takeaways, or get your calories in liquid-form..
The problem why home cooking sucks is that people have no idea what good kitchen equipment looks and performs like and buy expensive crap. They also fail to invest the time needed to get the basic techniques right.
I’ve recently contributed to refurbishing the kitchen in my rental (it went from a dump to a pretty nice kitchen with brand new - still consumer-grade - equipment) and would like to know how pro equipment would help and where to start (let’s say I don’t have the budget for a full commercial kitchen - which parts should I prioritise first?).
People don't have good chef knives and don't know how to sharpen them, they also tend to overspend grossly on them and still not get something with good performance. A good knife is thinly ground, with slight convex, tapers towards the tip, have a nice usable flat part and very nice curve towards the tip, made of easy to sharpen stainless steel. Don't obsess over HRC - 59-60 is enough.
If you don't have the budget - victorinox and mora have very nice cheap chef knives that can take a great edge but need some elbow grease to grind them a bit. And they cost like 30 euro.
Also get a beater knife - something cheap that you can use for rougher tasks that won't cry if it chips or breaks.
Consumer grade burners - both gas and electric are underpowered. A pro grade 3.5 Kw induction hob is a beast - I will take one of these vs a whole 60x60 cm with 4 burners the most powerful of which tops at 2kw. For gas - where I live there are some 7kw single burners. Once again beasts. Never used gas, so not sure how low their simmer is, but there should be something decent.
Also consumer grade mixers are rarely good enough, but their top models are probably more expensive than what you can get for commercial use. A professional electrolux be5 planetary is 350 w and still it can outmix something consumer that is 1250 w (it is expensive though, but build like a tank, just example of the wattage wars)
For ovens the only thing you need is raw power and thermal stability - ignore all bells and whistles (except properly executed steam, but those tend to cost as much as a combi oven). There are some self cleaning ovens that can be hacked to bake pizza in them, but it is dangerous and voids the warranty.
In germany there are very popular right now gas infrared top mini broilers 800C that can put insane crust on a steak. And cost 100 eur. This combined with sous vide is amazing meat all the time.
A good thing is that in the last years we actually start to see some good stuff being sized down to consumers, without sacrificing performance.
And so on ...
Isn’t the whole point/dream of becoming a professional chef, opening up a restaurant, etc. to have the experience of running your own space, designing it, building a menu, meeting your diners, watching their faces, seeing the lines form outside, getting a reputation, winning a Michelin Star, AND cooking some great food?
It feels like the whole model of the ghost/cloud/whatever kitchen removes 99% of that joy/misery/experience and strips it down to just making food and reading online reviews (good or bad) from people with no personal connection to you whatsoever.
I’m sure I’m missing something here, so please help me out, but it seems like this business model is terrific for the operator of the cloud kitchen and terrific for the delivery apps but turns the chefs into little more than assembly line factory workers.
More generally, most people don't have the luxury to simply do whatever they would optimally prefer to. They generally have to trade off preferences and pragmatics. Dreams don't put food on the table. So if there's a niche, in evolution or business, something is going to fill it eventually.
Or I can rent a commissary kitchen for $18/hr, plus $100-$200/mo or so in dry and refrigerated storage, and scale from there. I could get started in a week.
To most chefs, this is the difference between "I can afford this now" and "I will literally never in my entire life be able to afford this."
#1 the dream of being a professional painter is to have your works in the Louvre, but that doesn't stop you from enjoying your small gallery openings at the beginning of your career. You have to start somewhere.
#2 Opening your own restaurant is hella expensive and takes fucking forever. It's hard to explain the hell that is building a restaurant, and I don't even live in NY or SF where it's worse. You can get a product launched in a software company for less. The upside to a software company is a whole lot bigger though, so there's a lot less investment in restaurants. And I don't know if you know many chefs, but they tend to not have much money.
#3 there are all sorts of kitchens you're not thinking of where the space is rarely utilized, or frequently underutilized. VFW, church, and other social halls. Small food producers. Etc. This is money wasted to the owner. It's a win-win when those places get food trucks and ghost kitchens.
#4 a ghost kitchen isn't that dissimilar to owning a food truck. In fact a lot of them come from food trucks who have to operate out of some commissary anyway and want the stability of selling stuff year round.
#5 You're still doing most of the things in a ghost kitchen you do in any other restaurant, you just don't have tables. You still have a brand. You still develop a menu. You still manage employees. You still source ingredients. Etc. You just put stuff in a box instead of a plate and don't have a front of house (which, frankly, most chefs suck at anyway) to deal with.
The entire food industry is a bad business model for most of the people involved somehow.
If delivery gets optimized enough that it's no cheaper than making food at home then we can start doing nutrition trials like never before.
We forget that food is fuel. We know how to make it taste good, but it's an important aspect of our health. A lot of restaurants already allow selecting vegam, or gluten-free. Ideally, we would be able to try all sorts of things:
1) Select an elimination diet plan and since all meals are delivered you're more likely to stick to it. Different foods will get cut out and you can figure out if there's an allergy you're not aware of
2) If you're eating healthy, it's more trackable. It'll be possible to get a monthly email that tells you what nutrients you got. You can get blood tests to see if the nutrients are actually being absorbed.
3) Trackable food means I can pay less for insurance if I'm eating healthy. Right now nutrition is a very messy field. Some some vegan is better, some argue the paleo thing is best. How about we solve this with insurance? These companies will effectively make bets on your health outcomes based on what you're eating. Insurance companies that make bad bets will go out of business. We can get the preventative medicine we've always wanted because the cost of bad decisions will be reflected in your finances right away.
4) It might be easier to start a restaurant that serves a niche group since you get some benefits that come from economies of scale.
They don't prioritise their users high enough for me to trust them with what I put inside myself.
I'd much rather order from a local mom pop style place whose owners I can reach if I had to.