The Ghost Kitchens Pack

A podcast playlist on the delivery-first restaurant brands of the future

May 18, 2021

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Time to listen: ~2 hrs

Episodes included: 5

Listen to the pack on Spotify!

Back in May, a woman in Philadelphia hopped on Grubhub eager to support a local restaurant during the pandemic. A few taps lead her to a pizza joint called Pasqually’s. It was well-reviewed, so she gave it a go.

Only when her pizza arrived did she discover that Pasqually was not, in fact, a local Italian man, but the animatronic chef from Chuck E. Cheese, where her food had been prepared. She had inadvertently ordered from one of the many digital eateries hiding in plain sight in your favorite delivery apps.

If the idea of ordering from a dark, patronless kitchen terrifies you today, it won’t for long. At the end of the day, food is just another consumable good, and just as our relationship with consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands has shifted increasingly online, so too will our relationships with restaurants.

Prepared food: the final frontier of eCommerce

In the US, more than 20% of retail spending comes from online orders. More and more, our interactions with CPG brands are limited to Amazon listings or Shopify-powered digital storefronts. Today this feels normal, but it took decades of innovation to get here. The simplified version of the story goes something like this:

Amazon and social media platforms aggregated consumers, enabling established brands and upstarts alike to reach their audience digitally
Amazon and Shopify simplified the logistics of order fulfillment, allowing any brand to deliver on the promise of consistent convenience
Alibaba and other directories simplified manufacturing, enabling digitally native CPG brands to jump into the game with low capital requirements

The immensely complex logistics of food preparation and delivery have left restaurants comparatively untouched by the eCommerce revolution. Today, just 9% of US restaurant sales happen via delivery. This won’t be the case for long, though. If you look carefully, you’ll see a familiar story playing out:

Delivery apps are aggregating consumers, enabling any restaurant to reach its hungry patrons digitally
Delivery apps are simplifying the logistics of order fulfillment, enabling any restaurant to deliver on the promise of consistent convenience
Virtual kitchen startups like Cloud Kitchens, All Day Kitchens and Reef are simplifying prepared food “manufacturing”, enabling established brands to reconfigure their operations and upstarts to jump into the game with low capital requirements

The digital restaurants of the future

By 2030, Euromonitor estimates that delivery-only restaurants will be a $1 trillion global market, and everyone’s hungry for a slice of the pie (see what I did there? 😎 ).

To make sense of these new virtual eateries and the role they’ll play in our lives, I like to map them to their CPG eCommerce equivalents:

Opove (a Theragun knockoff sold primarily on Amazon) // Ghost Truck Kitchens (a NJ delivery optimized kitchen concept)
Adidas (a global apparel giant making an aggressive DTC push, despite still selling on Amazon) // Chipotle (a fast-casual pioneer whose digital push has lead to an explosion of sales via partnerships with Door Dash/Uber Eats and its own app)
Glossier (an OG DNVB) // Sweetgreen (a hip salad chain that does >50% of sales through its own digital properties)
Logan Paul’s Maverick (a clothing line from the controversial Youtuber) // Mr. Beast Burger (a digital burger chain from one of Youtube’s most surprising success stories that operates out of ghost kitchens and restaurants with extra capacity)

In this pack, you’ll hear from upstarts building the infrastructure for the on-demand future of food and industry vets racing to keep up.