How to start a Cloud Kitchen

[admin]

From the last few years, the food industry has tremendously grown from its conventional style of operations. With the booming demand of ordering food online and its agility of operations, the food industry is venturing into a new arena of business.

It is estimated that by 2023, the online food delivery market will generate a massive revenue of $137,596 worldwide. There is a visible shift in the consumers’ behaviour towards dining.

With the Online Food Ordering sector, Cloud Kitchens are becoming the prime players on the radar. Cloud Kitchen concentrates solely on the quality of food and delivery, thus saving time, effort, and money.

What is Cloud Kitchen?

Choose your term: Cloud Kitchen, Virtual Kitchen, Dark Kitchen, Ghost Kitchen.

It refers to a small subleased space where it focuses only for food delivery.

It doesn’t have a dine-in or takeaway facility.

A single kitchen can also house multiple brands under the same roof.

In the metro cities like New York and Boston, where the rent for establishing a full-fledged restaurant will keep on soaring, cloud kitchen will become the next best option for food startups.

To start a ghost kitchen, following steps are required:

1. Come up with a concept and customers.
   You may need to start with a concept to serve a particular customers/audience.   For example, an authentic Asian bakery will do well with Asian customers.
2. Pick a good location according to the demography of customers and your concept.
   If you see that your customers are concentrated in a certain area, then chances are you should open your shared kitchen there.
3. Register your company and negotiate lease.
   Once you’re happy with the location, it’s time to negotiate your lease and register your company.  You may want to pay attention to any regulations you need to follow in your jurisdication.
4. Design the menu.
   Design the menu according to the concept.  This can be tricky and depends on how well you know your customers – are they open to smaller menu or prefer bigger menu?
5. Purchase/lease your equipment.
   Depends on your shared kitchen space, if your space requires you to purchase/lease your own equipment, you should do so at this point.  Some providers have a list of vendors you can utilize as they may have special discounts for their clients.  Other alternatives is to find a restaurant broker who may have clients selling assets.  You maybe surprised as how common this is especially after COVID.
6. Start your marketing – ASAP!
   Since ghost kitchens are not the usual dine-in restaurants, it is extremely vital to have a regular online presence of your venture in the market through the website, social media, blogs.  The sooner you start your marketing strategy, the better you will be – especially if SEO is part of your strategy.
7. Partner with food delivery providers.
   Depends on where you live, some examples of food delivery providers are UberEats, Doordash, Eat24, and Grubhub.  You can also have your own delivery operation depending upon your budget.
8. Last but not least, get feedback from your customers.
   Once you open your cloud kitchen, always have a customer feedback process at hand.  This is crucial since it cost less to resell your food to regular customers instead of having to find new customers all the time.

Ghost kitchen is a game changer for food entrepreneurs.  It concentrates mainly on the food production by minimizing the infrastructure cost, overhead expenditure and gives better expansion opportunities, and finally – high profit margin.

Ghost kitchens are great drivers in today’s gig economy. They are also the crucial players in extending employment opportunities to delivery agents and cooks. Leveraging the benefits of online ordering, ghost kitchen meets the demands of the people and serves them more choices of diverse and delicious food.

In days to come, one of the most innovative business ideas of the era, ghost kitchen will redefine the definition of restaurant business for all of us.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by admin.
• This topic was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by admin.

[Susan06]

Its honestly a very amazing and comprehensive guide to the whole processing but theres a question i have in regards to the purchase of equipment. Wont the menu thats to be designed be made in light of the equipment available in the ghost kitchen choosing a menu item that requires specific equipment wouldn’t it be much better to choose a ghost kitchen that operates with that equipment than spend the money required to purchase that equipment.

[admin]

I’d say it would be wise to choose a menu that you can sell, then purchase the equipment based on that menu.

Your ability to sell a menu item trumps all other decisions. 

This is very vital in any kind of business.

 

[a0z0ra]

Or, one can experiment creatively and create new food with old equipment!  Just a thought.

[Author]

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