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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It makes perfect sense for food trucks that want to do nighttime delivery.

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.

That’s a weird take. It’s providing opportunity to chef entrepreneurs who want to cook but not run a “front of the house”.

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

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.

Maybe, but the alternative of trying to start a pop-up in a 'food hall' may be just as problematic, as landlords for those take a ~30% cut - see https://heated.medium.com/the-troubling-economics-of-food-ha... :

"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 "

Wait. You gotta pay rent and a cut? That’s an insane level of rent seeking.

Well, I guess that’s how rich people get richer. Rent seeking.

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.

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