Cloud kitchens – commercial facilities built to produce food for delivery

Saying a successful chef is easily replaced is a bit insulting.

It's an interesting point about the drivers. It does make sense to make it first in/first out as the food is ready.

"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 "

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.

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.

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.

Also many of them are food trucks, so they're still people you know if you're into the local food scene.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How is this possible? I thought the driver didn't get to see the destination until they actually pick up the rider.

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.

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.

#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.

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.