60. Where does your dinner come from?
It is 2 AM, and you are hungry, as usual. You pick up your phone and switch to your favorite food delivery app. You end up ordering a pizza from the delicious looking limited options you were provided with. The food arrives, and it is miles away from your expectations.
Many times, you don’t even know your meal was prepared in a dark kitchen. Whatever you may call it: virtual kitchen, ghost kitchens or cloud kitchens. But they all mean the same thing. These kitchens sell exclusively through food delivery services and have no dine-in facilities. They are essentially warehouses, and instead of diners, you find rows of shipping containers, marked with carefully packed foods. In a nutshell, dark kitchens are sites where restaurant food is cooked, but no restaurant exists.
There is a discussion if these dark kitchens are the future of take away? So is this true?
Usually, the mechanism is simple. Orders come in, meals are cooked and the food reaches the customers. These dark kitchens are usually operated by one restaurant or, in some cases, a few restaurants. Existing restaurants, be it branded chains or local eateries often come into partnership with these dark kitchens, who recreate the restaurant’s food deliver it to the customers. The individual restaurants may or may not provide the menu, the staff, and the support. Usually, the dark kitchens try that their food looks and tastes the same as that from a traditional outlet.
The aim is to increase their delivery capacity. In terms of service and operation, dark kitchens are very different from a dine-in restaurant: where customers walk in, sit at a table and enjoy their meal. Dark kitchens function solely through mobile applications, and via home delivery. They usually operate in areas with high demands.
There are various reasons as to why these kitchens are all over the country. Firstly, the increasing rise of food delivery apps has paved the way for the concept of Dark Kitchen. These kitchens exist to meet the growing demand for third-party apps. Another reason could be the increasing costs and competition in operating a restaurant. In retrospect, dark kitchens are fairly easier to operate, as it has no physical restaurant premises. Hence, to think of a few pros, these dark kitchens slash the rents costs and the wages of the serving staff. It is a way for restaurants to pool in resources and reduce overheads to increase their capacity to deliver food. Hence, it is a way of less investment for more delivery!
Nobody knows where these dark kitchens are. The marketing usually has no contact information: either physical or phone. Most often these dark kitchens are mobile and move from one place to another. In the United Kingdom, we see the example of the Deliveroo App, which is planning to roll out 200 dark kitchens across different countries. In India, New Delhi based Lite Bite Foods, which runs restaurants such as Punjab Grill, Asia Seven, said it will add at least 20 dark kitchens in this financial year to expand its business. Besides, KFC and Chai Point already runs such ghost kitchens1. With food delivery applications growing at a rapidly increasing pace, these dark kitchens will only grow with time.
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