Ghost Kitchens Model

Sounds like a business opportunity for a startup that treats restaurants better.

IMO it does show that restaurants have to downsize their footprint to not really be restaurants anymore as the costs are just too high for the slim margins. An idea would be to convert to smaller purposeful rented kitchens or even food trucks that are in zoned parking lot delivery pickup areas for app services to quickly go to and deliver to clients. I lean toward the food truck model as you have the best of both worlds where you have a gathering of food choices in-person when nearby and a way f

I get recruitment emails for a startup some people from Uber are making called Cloud Kitchens. Basically kitchens that can scale based on demand. The company provides ingredients and the kitchens make the food. Share resources make it more productive. I think restaurants themselves are unproductive.

1 - I am not heavily invested.2 - Misinformation poisons and I’m trying to surface facts that are being overrun by a narrative.3 - Misunderstanding one of the largest entrepreneurial & capital efforts in our lifetime, especially on HN, will inevitably slow other entrepreneurs journeys who miss the real story and how to apply these lessons themselves. That’s why I wrote the parent comment.4 - With your “uppity” comment let’s limit the ad hominem yes?5 - Broaden your thinking aroun

Restaurants are a spectrum too. Some restaurants may not have much of what you call as kitchen. It's not like they make food from raw ingredients. They might just assemble the food. A lot of it could be instant food, pre-made. They might just do wrapping, stuffing and heating it up. Not too different from what uber eats does.

Isn't the main problem that the kitchens are shared and the restaurants are just popup brands with no loyalty built up?I don't think you need an actual sit-down location to succeed, but you do need full control over what you produce and to spend time building trust and loyalty.

I ran an Uber Eats-only toasted sandwich business with my brothers for a month as an experiment - we rented a small room with no shopfront, and while we were popular, realised it was difficult to grow revenue when your only source of orders was via the gatekeeper apps (Uber Eats, etc) that take a high margin, and your at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others.This makes me think anyone running a cloud kitchen is going to always be under the thumb of the apps/landlord

More cooks = bigger kitchen which is impossible in tiny restaurants of city centers.I also doubt it’s a good decision to invest in bigger real estate and more employees while the delivery companies are always on the edge of going bankrupt or being regulated.Also, a restaurant is not an easy to scale business : most of their value is a mix between the location and the cooking team. You can’t easily change one (or both) without changing your restaurant uniqueness.

> pizza, Indian, Thai, Sushi etc. placesthis selection contains the answer to your question: all those cuisines's recipes use few ingredients in a lot of variations and have preparations that can easily sit waiting for a customer.it's harder to find restaurants or other places with large or daily menus that can sustain a structured delivery chain as primary income source, maybe they can support the more unstructured uber food aproach but usually that's it. exceptions appl

Tech startups are not very comparable to restaurants. Restaurants have limited capacity, limited ability to scale, usually pay rent (so any success can be partially sucked up by the landlord), and have limited times of the day and week to earn most of their money.To support terrible profit margins (relative to the risk), I also would look at the financial status of restaurant owners/operators, who by and large, aren't in the higher end of the income scale. Almost no one tells thei