Ghost Kitchens Breaking Conventional Restaurant Retail Practices

Food delivery apps brought in a storm of new opportunities and trends. After the advent of home-delivery apps, even the smallest of brick-and-mortar restaurants got the equal opportunity of serving their consumers in their homes. Before, such luxuries were only offered by established food chains such as Domino’s or Pizza Hut.

In addition to this, food delivery apps have given these restaurant owners the boost to join the cult Ghost Kitchen trends. Ghost Kitchens that also go by the name Virtual Kitchens are stripping off the traditional dining space with efficient delivery-only workspaces.

This blog sheds light on how the concept of ghost kitchens has been adopted by the world and the conveniences it promotes.

Overview

Ghost Kitchens are kitchen spaces free from the traditional regimes of serving their customers with fancy tables and spoons. Even the location or size of the shop doesn’t matter. These kitchens are specially designed to prepare quick meals to facilitate even quicker home deliveries.

Ghost kitchens offer opportunities to budding entrepreneurs and to existing brands. Not only do the new players get to offer their services at lower costs, but also get quicker marketing as opposed to a conventional restaurant. Existing brands can expand their business into new areas while taking minimal risk.

When the year 2020 began, no one had any idea about the challenging times everyone was about to face. As the world experienced a lockdown, almost 75% of brick-and-mortar restaurants had to become a part of at least one of the food delivery platforms. Many restaurants had to restrict dine-ins and had no other option other than pivoting to a delivery or take-out model.

Ghosts on the Rise

When the traditional table service restaurants got to online platforms, they had a ton of questions that needed answers. What would be the perfect menu? How much time does it take to prepare each item? Are the menu items delivery-friendly? How much business will I do in the first quarter?

As time passed, the restaurants learned and starting designing a take-out accessible menu. The optimized menu and building confidence over running virtual kitchens gave these establishments the perfect boost.

There isn’t a certainty as to how the coronavirus will fare this year, but the ghost kitchens have surely made it to the popular options list in the food business. The restaurant chain Kona Poke plans to open 20 ghost kitchens inside Reef’s kitchen in the Miami facility.

Full-service restaurants might be excited to throw in the full-party as COVID ends, but they can’t deny the potential business that virtual kitchens have earned them over the past year. If they plan on expanding their services, surely ghost kitchens will be at the top of their lists. As an upside, the ghost kitchens support social distancing naturally.

Benefits of Ghost Restaurants

A Kitchen With Same Fundamentals

A brick-and-mortar restaurant can start with a conventional menu to learn and get adjusted to the new dynamics of the business. If you already own a business, then you can rent your space to an established brand name or start your experimental venture. If you already have an established ghost kitchen, you can plan out where your future investments can be.

No matter which way you start the fundamentals of doing business remains the same. There is no substitute for efficient management and good food.

Yet technology such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, and augmented reality offer ways to add-on to the current ways of conducting business.

These new methods will enable restaurateurs to:

Manage Cost & Inventory

Every restaurant aims at investing efficiently in the resources they need to utilize. Advanced analytics help restaurants to spend wisely on their inventory expenses. Managing your cost and inventory would account for a healthy bottom-line reflecting in your sales. Keeping a check on the cost of sales can give you a proper analogy of the items that can be replaced with an alternative.

Healthy Supply Chain

The current crisis has affected everyone, including the suppliers. As a result, they too have stocked some inventory and not enough of others. You should be an avid observer of your supply chain to procure the supplies you need at the proper time and a fair price. You can then monitor the supply chain for worse conditions like bad weather or the ones we’re experiencing right now.

Waste Management

Food wastage is an inevitable process in the food industry. As per a survey, the amount of food that gets wasted every year is 25 billion USD every year. But through advanced data analytics, it’s predicted that the food costs can be cut from 2-6% if restaurants manage their inventory efficiently.

Expansion

Expanding an ongoing business is a constant process. With ghost kitchens, there are many ways of expanding. For example, busy families and budding chefs are always looking for platforms that can offer them recipes and ingredients to cook meals at home. You can add the meal-kit section to your current business and offer the users a new way to interact with your brand.

Flexibility

A year ago, many restaurants had no idea that one day they would have to offer their services online. Or even before that, Uber Eats and DoorDash had no idea that they would be dominating the online food sector in the future. We’ve learned that anything can happen at any time. So you must try and adapt to the future trends as quickly as possible. You must gather customer data and make sure you retain customers by offering them different ways to connect with your brand. You

Afterword

Above we learned how the concept of ghost kitchens is offering numerous business opportunities to entrepreneurs around the world and the added benefits tech is providing them. The ghost kitchen industry is predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2030. Do you start your ghost kitchen segment like Faasos? Yes! Then let’s discuss more over a call.

Technource, a top PHP Development Company. With 9+ years of industry experience, he shares his guidance to start-ups to grow with project delivery solutions. You can hire PHP developers as per the requirement.