A direct consequence of the health crisis on the restaurant trade, the rise of the dark kitchen is a genuine phenomenon. These virtual restaurants are riding the boom in meal delivery. With no dining room, they stake everything on a fully equipped kitchen and online orders. Delivery is therefore built into the concept, and it has to be thought through from the moment the ghost restaurant is set up. A traditional restaurant can lean on table service to lift customer satisfaction; a ghost kitchen has only the quality of the food it cooks and, above all, its delivery service. From setting one up to getting the food out, here is how this new business model works.
Understanding the dark kitchen concept
What a dark kitchen is
Dark kitchens, also known as ghost restaurants, are restaurants made up of nothing but a fully equipped kitchen, built to sell meals for delivery. Their business model no longer rests on a dining room where customers come to eat. It focuses purely on cooking the meals and delivering them. The model is attracting all sorts of players today: chains looking to diversify, pure players, even fairly traditional restaurants that want to shed the constraints of running a dining room. A ghost restaurant is usually a unit converted into a heavily equipped kitchen, laid out with a single aim in mind: cutting the time it takes to make a dish and get it out.
Where the dark kitchen came from
Straight out of the United States, ghost restaurants were born of a simple observation: very strong demand for evening meals delivered to homes in Chicago neighbourhoods with no restaurant nearby. That is where the first dark kitchens appeared, around ten years ago. Today ghost kitchens are booming, and the health crisis accelerated their development. Repeated restaurant closures changed consumer habits for good. Delivery used to be a bonus; now it is essential.
What makes a ghost restaurant different?
- Sited in strategic areas: usually less densely populated than city centres, but the rent is lower.
- Better control over costs
- Reliance on delivery providers: dark kitchens generally work with delivery platforms.
- Strong, constant communication: dark kitchens have a big online presence and are usually at the cutting edge of technology. Marketing budgets are substantial as a result, both to build and spread the brand and to stay competitive among so many rival offers.
How do you launch a dark kitchen?
Choosing your dark kitchen concept
Think about your offer: which dishes will you serve?
Some dark kitchens appeared as an extension of so-called “traditional” restaurants. In that case the concept already exists, though nothing obliges you to stick with it. Online meal delivery is a chance to widen your range. Give some thought to the dishes you will offer for delivery: some travel far better than others. If you are starting from scratch, ask yourself what your concept is, then work out the products and the menu that go with it. Do not forget preparation time. In a dark kitchen, a dish has to be ready in 10 to 20 minutes at most, and delivery time is added on top. The wait between the order and the food arriving must not be too long, or your customers’ satisfaction suffers. Strategic questions are worth asking too: what is my speciality? How will my dark kitchen actually run? That thinking is critical to optimising the whole production chain, from taking the order to cooking the dish to delivering it. Every step deserves study.
Run a competitor analysis to stand out
Before setting up any business, you need to carry out market research. It gives you a clear view of your competitors and of how your future customers behave. That step matters all the more since the covid-19 crisis, which brought new phenomena to the restaurant trade. You will also need to budget for your dark kitchen. Even if the costs of fitting out a dining room and of staffing it are lower than in a traditional restaurant, a ghost kitchen still calls for a budget worth planning.
Choosing where to put your dark kitchen
Ghost restaurants have no dining room, but where you site one still needs strategic thought. Somewhere on the edge of town lets you deliver your cooked food without paying an exorbitant rent or facing fierce competition. You are not obliged to set up in the city centre, but make sure your kitchen is not too far from it. A radius of 5 km is the usual advice, which keeps deliveries fast at a reasonable cost.
Checking that you meet the rules
Make sure the place you choose can house a professional kitchen. It has to meet the hygiene and safety rules that apply across the restaurant trade. And make sure you hold every administrative and legal document you need: authorisations, contracts, insurance and so on.
Building your presence on social media
To promote your restaurant, social media is essential. In your sales and marketing plan, go where your potential customers already are. Social media is also a way to share your menu, make your ghost kitchen known, show what happens behind the scenes or introduce the team. Remember that table service will not be there to tip the balance on customer satisfaction, so you have to build that trust through social media instead.
Choosing your delivery provider
You now have part of the business in place, namely your business plan and, above all, your kitchen. Next comes the crucial choice: delivery. It weighs even heavier in a dark kitchen that cannot fall back on table service, so choosing a home delivery platform is not a decision to take lightly, all the more so as the choice of providers is wide. Platforms such as Deliverect can guide you if you are lost among the offers. Deliverect integrates with a long list of third-party delivery platforms, the best known on the market and many others besides. Your provider has to be professional and match what you need: food safety standards weigh heavily in that choice, and your reputation rides on it.
Why outsource dark kitchen deliveries?
As we have seen, the way you deliver has to be thought through from the moment you set up your ghost kitchen. Doing the deliveries yourself demands a whole other organisation. Taking orders and arranging their delivery, making sure you have enough drivers, running refrigerated vehicles suited to the city and to the goods carried: all of it is crucial to logistics that work. Unfortunately none of it is cheap. In time or in money, bringing deliveries in-house is not the ideal answer if optimisation is what you are after. Since a dark kitchen’s whole point is to squeeze every minute out of preparing the food, why stop short of the delivery?
Why choose Shippr x Deliverect for your dark kitchen deliveries?
Building an offer for business customers
Delivering to consumers is one thing; delivering to businesses is another. With Shippr you can do both. Need a delivery for an event or a corporate buffet? We handle the transport from A to Z. Our large fleet of refrigerated vehicles, up to 20 m3 lorries, carries your goods safely. Shippr’s flexibility lets you absorb peaks in demand and swings in the volumes to deliver: we add as many drivers as you need, event by event. We brief them too, so they represent your brand at its best. Our deliveries are personalised to the point where our drivers can wear a t-shirt carrying your brand, which widens the positive impact a professional delivery has on it. Outsourcing to Shippr takes the brakes off, so you can grow the business without thinking about logistics.
Delivering to your customers straight from your dark kitchens
Shippr specialises in same-day delivery. Our range of delivery options lets you offer each customer the one that suits them. Once they have ordered from your ghost kitchen, our professional Shippr drivers take over and carry it straight to their door. With express delivery in particular, your customers are guaranteed delivery within the hour, so the food arrives as though it had just left your kitchen. You and your customer can both track the delivery in real time, with SMS or email updates on where the order has got to. We know your reputation and your customers’ satisfaction rest on delivery done well, so our expertise goes into every job.
Choosing a delivery partner that knows the cold chain
Shippr already works with a great many customers in the restaurant trade. Our drivers are professionals trained in temperature-controlled transport. 100% AFSCA compliant, with refrigerated vehicles and temperature checks, they keep the cold chain intact. Food safety depends on transport done properly, so it matters who you trust with your fresh produce.
Moving stock between your ghost restaurants
Run several ghost kitchens? What happens when one of them runs out of a product? Whether you need to move foodstuffs between your ghost kitchens, or containers such as boxes, Shippr runs kitchen-to-kitchen deliveries as well. Express or scheduled, just book the transfer on Shippr and we take care of the rest.
A Deliverect integration that is easy and effective for your dark kitchen deliveries
Shippr’s delivery service is available on the Deliverect platform, so any Deliverect user can plug it in and run their dark kitchen’s deliveries through it. We have devoted a whole article to the integration. Want to know how Shippr can help you? Book a meeting with one of our business experts, who will be glad to answer your questions.
