Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a "Stripe Atlas" for brick and mortar businesses. 90% of the work to start a restaurant, cafe, shop, etc., must be the near identical to others colocated in the same city/state.

The rise of "ghost kitchens" tries to solve this in some way but I think there's opportunity to go further.

View on HN

Restaurants and other brick-and-mortar food businesses are highly location dependent. Only way to find the right location is boots on the ground, getting a good real estate agent, real estate lawyer etc. That's a rather more bespoke service than something like Stripe Atlas could provide.

As for incorporation, tax filing, payroll and everything else a business needs, there are already companies providing those services to the food industry. Maybe they're ripe for disruption by a superior experience though?

1. I wonder why we are not seeing "cloud brewing"? The process, as they describe it, seems very standard.

2. For restaurants, it's either "ghost/cloud kitchens" or franchises. If you go outside those, it's possible that restaurants require too much uniqueness and too much risk to fit a standardized model.

Cloud brewing is definitely a thing, but I think the name for it is "contract brewing." A larger brewery will allow a smaller/startup brewer to rent their facilities to make a few batches.

It’s not uncommon for craft brewers to contract out the brewing of bigger runs. Evil Twin (and I think his brother, Mikkeller as well) was exclusively a “phantom brewer” who developed recipes and then had other breweries brew them on contract. Sometimes it’s bigger established breweries that do a few batches on contract for them, but there’s also explicit contract breweries like De Proefbrouwerij

contract brewing is huge. Usually it's used when a small brewery wins a national award (GABF Gold is a popular category) or if they want to start distributing outside of just the taproom.

http://www.sleepinggiantbrewing.com/ is an example of one such contract only business.

In Chicago, I’ve started to see “co-brewing” spaces where a few smaller breweries share a single brewing and taproom space.

As others point out, contract brewing is definitely a thing, but a better comparison than cloud computing would be shared hosting: you're stuck with whatever stack they happen to have installed, no admin rights, and you get the same dismal bandwidth as all other tenants. Or back to brewing: yup, the process is fairly standard – and how could it not be – but great breweries tend to be great not just because they have good recipes, but often because they have mastered their gear and have perfected their processes across the board. Only very few contract breweries are that good.

Why are only few breweries that good ?

And is that something that can, with the right investment be scaled, and offered affordably ?

Or is it inherently expensive ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com