I decided to talk about something we live in right now, the new era of restaurants.  

I was listening to one podcast in Spanish about the next new business ideas, and they mentioned one very successful case in New York.  One restaurant was about to close its doors because of the pandemic. Instead of closing  the restaurant, they opened 16 more, which is ridiculous. Why they open more restaurants when many other businesses are closing doors? 

Well, they create 16 Ghost restaurants. What is a ghost restaurant or a dark kitchen?  t is a food service operation that is meant for delivery only.  In other words, they don’t have a dining room, and they don’t have chairs or tables.   Thanks to the internet, ghost kitchen can operate, have their menus on one web page, the customers can see the options, and order the food. The payment is easy to do they can pay by cards or bitcoins.    

But is this idea new? Actually it isn’t. The first case we have of delivery food is by King Umberto 1  and Queen Margherita of Savoy when they were visiting Naples around 1889. The queen became sick after eating rotten food. Chef Raffaele Esposito had the glory of serving his pizza to the royals.    

The queen wanted to eat a pizza with mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes; Esposito took the pizzas to them himself. This is known as the first-ever pizza delivery recorded. 

This concept gets more popular with the emerging of the internet, and nowadays, the pandemic helps develop this business model to another stage.  

In Digital Disciplines, Joe Weinman talks about how we can use digital technologies to achieve competitive advantage through market-leading processes, products and services, customers relationship, and innovation.  

This technology creates customer value. I’m not talking about the latest technology, the newest cell phone, or the latest 8k TV with the best resolution, but how innovation and technology are creating a considerable experience in the digital world and how customers value this experience.  

 In Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, they suggest research for uncontested market spaces, like Uber, the clearest example of innovation and how they create an entirely new market.  

Kim and Mauborgne said that there are three platforms of Value Innovation: Product, Service and Delivery.   

Technical innovation refers to the process of implementing new ideas and improvements that are born from practical knowledge and are related to a production process. 

But what kind of innovation? 

They used Technical, this innovation refers to the process of implementing new ideas and improvements that are born from practical knowledge and are related to a production process. 

The objective of technical innovation can be to lower production costs or shorter production times of a product and increase the safety of the production process or improve the quality of the final product. 

Similarly, technical innovation can target a product with new and better features. 

In other words, technical innovation is continuous improvement within a production process. 

The objective of technical innovation can be to lower production costs or shorter production times of a product and increase the safety of the production process or improve the quality of the final product. 

Analyzing the case of the ghost kitchen, they do have an innovation: their product is food, but what they did was the optimization of their workplace and materials, from one restaurant with only one menu and only one segment group, to 16 restaurants with different menus with 16 different segment groups and that is Innovative.   

The service:   

They created new web pages to reach new customers and give them the best customer service experience with high-quality media photos and videos, web design easy to use and order, and easy payment methods.     

The new and small businesses need to understand that having a good web page helps you reach customers easier. Still, the experience your web page brings to your customers is essential so the customers can trust your products and services.   

We can see  Amazon is a clear example of this, they create a webpage but is no just a simple webpage, but they constantly develop their web page for better customer experience.  

Uber they also are constantly developing their web pages to make them more customers friendly and the experience of buying online easier.   

Why should I believe in a webpage that does not work well and is very confusing?  Having a good, customer-friendly web page brings more trust for the business.  

Using Google ads and their big data is how this business can reach their new customers. For this case, they segmented their marketing ubication few blocks around their business: Why not expand more?   

Delivery:   

They did their own delivery. They didn’t want to use uber eats or other delivery services because they charge 30 % of the hole price, they delivered 16 menus to the closest customers. They saved a lot of money, creating their own delivery system, in the Pandemic time, they create a clean system, showing on social media they care about their customers.  

This practice of showing on social media gave them more trust.   

This case is an example of how we can digitalize business. Even they sell physical products (food), they manage to create a digital business very functional, and they will continue with digital optimization, I believe this is the new era of restaurants, and Corona pandemic shows us we need to disrupt our business models, and I believe in the future restaurant will have a physical place with tables and chairs and they will also have menus they don’t show to their physical costumers but only to their online customers, and everything will be prepared under the same establishment. 

I want to tell you one more example about this, but it is about cloud kitchen and the case of Mr beast burger cloud Kitchen. 

What is a cloud kitchen? 

A cloud kitchen is a delivery-only restaurant that has no physical space for dine-in. It relies entirely on online orders placed through online food aggregators or an online ordering-enabled website or mobile App.  

The cloud kitchen format gives the restaurant the flexibility to launch more than one brand using the same kitchen infrastructure. Multi-brand cloud kitchens allow the restaurateur to utilize the same kitchen infrastructure and resources to operate multiple brands. 

For example, a restaurateur who owns a delivery-only kitchen and delivers South Indian food can start offering Mexican food as well. But instead of adding Mexican to the menu of his current brand, he can begin to operate a different brand that sells Mexican from the same delivery-only kitchen.  

The reason restaurateurs prefer to start a new brand instead of introducing new items on the same menu is that customers prefer to order from a different restaurant if they think it specializes in that particular cuisine. 

Mr. Beast, known as Jimmy Donaldson, is a YouTuber with more than fifty million followers. He made a video announcing he will open his own restaurant and he will give food for free and money for free. The video has more than 30 million views and was the perfect excuse to told people to download one App and buy burgers. Mr, Beast Burger has more than 300 locations in the United States, and They made more than 15 million dollars of revenue in 48 hours. 

After having read this news came to mind many questions and many doubts: How this guy opened 300 restaurants? How he came with this idea?.  

Digging more about this news, I found Mr. Beast made a deal with The virtual dining concepts and its President Robbie Earl, who is the son of Robert Earl who is the founder of Hard Rock Cafe. They came with this business model. They created the whole design behind the Burger. They made a deal with the restaurants around the United States; I didn’t know whether the profit is divided by 3 equal parts: Mr. Beats, The virtual dining concepts, and the restaurateurs. 

To me, it was spectacular how they did the whole operation. They contact one guy (Mr. beats) who has a very large audience range, then you talk with the restauranteurs who want to do burgers in their kitchens, and you provided with the platform (the App), so everything is controlled and monitored by the owner of the Idea. And this idea came in the middle of the pandemic, ideas like this we need to study more closely because we can change the way of doing business in restaurants. 

The real estate business will change in the future for this kind of business. People will build larges halls with all the facilities just for Ghost kitchens. The owners of the Ghost Halls will provide the delivery service and maybe the web pages will be under only one and big domain, the marketing will be provided ass well buy the owners of the halls. The development of their webpages to be more customer-friendly and the digital customer engagement will be their aim.  

“The Ghost Kitchen is the new Uber and the new Airbnb in the Food Industry” 

LITERATURE REFERENCES:  

Weinman J, 2015. Digital Disciplines: Attaining Market Leadership via the Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobile, and the Internet of Things. 

Mauborgne R and Chan Kim W. 2004. Blue Ocean Strategy 

Carlos Munoz Podcast Food industry in Latin America in new business ideas. 

8 Jan. 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEvXlLZT7JY&ab_channel=IdeasMasterMu%C3%B1oz  

Bridet S. May 2020  

Towards a new era of virtual catering 

https://medium.com/curiosityiskeysfr/dark-kitchens-52e31ae1cb09