10 ms·

An Inside Look at CloudKitchens

133 points by MKais 6y ago

0898 6y ago
"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." I doubt this very much.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  It is possible, but for bad reasons: food won't become that cheap in isolation, but in conjunction with the marginal cost of taking the time to cook being greater. If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. If you live in a food desert working 3 part time jobs, the above is probably already true and you survive off convenience store non-perishables and fast food.
  - 0898 6y ago
    You mean if you factor in your time? Okay: in that case maybe.
    - rosseloh 6y ago
      I can't comment on the actual subject at hand (I haven't read the article yet nor really done any research on this), but you absolutely have to factor in your time. I like to cook. If my home situation was a little bit different, I'd probably cook full proper meals every night, no questions asked. It would take me at minimum an hour each night, and often more when you include prep and cleaning (which you should, they're integral parts of cooking a meal). Combine that with long hours at work and the fact that I like to at least get some leisure time in my day along with sleep, and those hours add up. I've actually taken to eating mostly frozen food (stuff that still requires a little prep, not TV dinners, mind you), because it's a little faster and the cleanup is easier(stick some frozen chicken on foil in the oven and the cleanup is "throw the foil away"). When I don't do that, I'm meal-prepping on sunday afternoons, which takes four or more hours out of my precious weekend (with the exchange of being able to just microwave whatever I'm eating for lunch and dinner that week, again saving time). Yes, where I live, groceries cost far less than anything you can get at a restaurant. And I'm hesitant to say that this will go anywhere, because it really seems like a long shot. But if it does get somewhere...the dollar cost of groceries is not the only thing to focus on. Time spent making meals absolutely matters.
      - notyourday 6y ago
        Time spent making meals is a dead time. Those that do not consider that to be a dead time simply buy instapots, slow cookers and rice cookers.
      - devchix 6y ago
        I tell my work mates I spend probably 8+ hours in the kitchen during the weekend doing meal prep and they are some combination of aghast and disbelieving. Yes, 8+ if you want to eat decent, we're not being fancy. You can't just get groceries and come home to stuff them in the fridge. They need to be semi-prepped: unwrapped, minor cleaning, portioning out. Herbs and greens need to be washed and stored properly or they'll spoil. Want good soup? Have to break down the chicken to make stock, defat and freeze it. There's also the planning aspect, if you wake up on Saturday and start the grocery list, it's too late. I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. It's a huge time suck and if I factor in the cost of my time it's exorbitant. Having said all that, there is no reasonable alternative for me, right now. Everything else is garbage or unpalatable or exorbitant, and I still have to do supplemental cooking. I'm resigned to the fact that cooking, eating, cleaning, laundry is all part of living and I can't pay for all of it to go away. I'm trying to be a better planner, and chop and peel faster.
        rosseloh 6y ago
        > I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. Totally. I love cooking. But when I say I love cooking, I mean I love standing over a pot or pan, stirring, tasting, seasoning, and sauteing. Prep work is the worst part, and also often the part that takes the longest.
        throw7 6y ago
        I love prep work! Cutting down a whole chicken.... chopping, prepping the mise en place. I find it really relaxing. :) seriously. Love the cooking part also too... what I hate is the dishwashing!
  - michaelt 6y ago
    > If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. Is this the case where you live? In my country, daily restaurant eating is less a sign of success, and more a sign of not knowing how to cook, which is a source of embarrassment for most overachieving professionals.
    - macNchz 6y ago
      In NYC at least there is certainly a subset of ambitious professional types who derive some kind of pride at being incompetent at everything other than their job. I think it's humblebrag type thing where they show off a) how overworked they are all the time, which is a perverse status symbol here b) how they can afford to pay someone to do everything in their lives for them.
      - aqme28 6y ago
        You can even rent an apartment here that doesn't have a kitchen.
- idiot900 6y ago
  This has already been true for a long time in high cost of living places like Manhattan, where groceries can be expensive and time is at a premium. It was certainly the case for me for years.
  - gpapilion 6y ago
    I found this to be true before having kids. The waste was so high it pushed the cost up for groceries. After increasing the number of mouths I find delivery to be much higher.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    That's simply not true. Even if one buys all his or her ingredients at bodegas he will still beat the prices of the delivered food, not to mention that the cheap delivery food is basically low quality junk food.
- amf12 6y ago
  I too doubt it will be as cheap, but scale and other related (but not accounted for) costs could make it similar. For example time spent cooking, grocery shopping, gas (cooking + fuel*), etc. One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. These don't apply to cloud kitchens. More so, the cloud kitchens are not in a very popular high-rent area. However, cloud kitchens can increase competition resulting into less profit.
  - joosters 6y ago
    One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. That is what makes a restaurant a restaurant, rather than a takeaway. Restaurants didn't end up with dine-in areas by accident, nor do they offer in-house dining as some kind of loss-leader, they have it by choice because it makes them more money! (that is, pre-Covid, of course...)
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? I think that was true in certain situations, but very hard to pull off in general. We are seeing a shift away from restaurants as a luxury good, and in doing so I think the mythos of white table cloths, domestic labor cos-playing, etc. will go away. That, in turn, was I think a big part how they raised margins, so I think the basic cloud kitchen premise is correct.
      - xnyan 6y ago
        >Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? It's hard, but many do it. The biggest advantage sit-down has is "addons", primarily booze. Breaking even on the food and making a profit on beer, wine, and cocktails is very common. Cocktails are intended to be drunk at the time of mix, and I have better quality and cheaper wine and beer already at home. No reason to order it with delivery. Also when you're in the restaurant, you can (and are encouraged to) keep ordering more food vs a one time transaction on your phone.
      - 6y ago
- peteretep 6y ago
  In Bangkok, this is very true already for me
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Exactly. Until preparation and delivery become roboticized, it is absolutely not true. I live in New York City, eat meat, and it's easy to spend only ~$300/mo. on groceries for the month if you're paying attention to prices and cooking yourself. That's $3.25 per meal. Please show me how exactly I can get nutritious full prepared meals at this price, let alone delivered...
  - m463 6y ago
    I noticed sometimes that frozen dinners in the supermarket are sometimes 10/$10. Maybe this doesn't qualify as "full" (or possibly even "nutritious") but could food preservation figure into it? also, recognize there is a demand. Another thing I think about, is that probably in the 90's (the era of the CD) I remember meeting someone who worked in digital music (this was so long ago I can't recall who). But I remember what he said "in the future, digital music will probably cost like 10 or 20 cents a song or less". I couldn't imagine it at the time. Could the same happen with food? Maybe there's a lot of overhead built into our current model of getting "cheap" groceries and cooking. Could $300/mo on groceries be expensive compared to buying component items like flour or rice or salt? and what if delivery brought a week of meals instead of one-offs?
  - wenc 6y ago
    I suspect it is possible, but margins will be very tight and will require volume/scale and velocity. Velocity (in money) is an unintuitive concept (Returns = Margin * Velocity), but it's how many ethnic grocers get returns on relatively low margins. (that, and tremendous cost control, staffing with family members, different supply chains, etc.) $300/mth sounds about right (I checked mine, ~$325 in Chicago, at big box grocery stores, eating healthy, lots of meat and produce). There was a time when I was shopping exclusively at ethnic groceries and my average was ~$200/mth ($50/wk).
  - LaserToy 6y ago
    I’m curious - how much do you earn per hour and how many hours do you spend on cooking/shopping/cleaning per month?
    - 6y ago
- WC3w6pXxgGd 6y ago
  Economies of scale. Same reason a Chipotle is almost the same price as preparing your own burrito.
- ponker 6y ago
  I don't know how it's going to happen (if I did, I'd be a billionaire) but I am pretty confident for the same reasons that I don't build my own mobile phones or furniture or sew my own clothes, I eventually won't cook my own food, except as a hobby the same way people make their own furniture and clothes today. I can't make a McChicken sandwich for $1.39 so in some ways we're already there.
- blackoil 6y ago
  It may be possible if you reduce menu choices to 4-5 / day and sell monthly pass i.e. you'll have to buy at least 20 meals a month. This will allow for bulk cooking and bundle delivery to reduce the costs. Fixed demand allows you to predict cost and expenditure.
- smoe 6y ago
  Think it depends on your living situation. I have been living alone for a long time, but was used to having lunch in cafeterias / restaurants and only cook on weekends mostly. Over the last months of working from home, deciding to cook for myself ~90% of the time, it took me quite a while to figure out a good balance between being cost/time effective, having little waste as well as being reasonably diverse and fresh. E.g. what I have seen some times, that people food prep on Sunday 5x the same lunch to eat during the week, absolutely does not work for me. It is cheaper than having food delivered, but only if I don't count my own time. If I didn't actually like cooking or weren't reasonably good at it, I would order food most of the days.
- jkinudsjknds 6y ago
  I think a generous VC could make it last for a while.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  It will never become cheaper because VC scum needs to eat and pay thousands of developers to constantly rebuild their engineering playground. Let's assume for a second that it is actually cheaper for the company (a very big "if" considering the profitability of current delivery operations), do you really think they'd just pass on the savings to you, as opposed to pocketing them and/or wasting them?
Ericson2314 6y ago
WeWork for kitchens is an interesting mixed bag. > It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yoursel The techno-utopianist I cannot beat out of me is excited. It is rediculous that we avoid economies of scale to save money. > Drivers Damn, to think the rest of the US is doing car delivery is ridiculous. NYC's ubiquitous bike delivery is a great example of why density is just more efficient. > > The “ghost kitchen” would change all of that. In place of small businesses there would only be a series of tractor trailers staffed with interchangeable “freelance contractors” cooking, presumably with no benefits or fixed hours. Lol I don't think much people get benefits at restaurants already. Still, the quote is absolutely correct, they won't start getting it either. IMO every "gig work" company should be pushing hard as hell for universal healthcare etc., as removes a huge competitive advantage of their competition. Do it for the $$ not the altruism, if you must. ----- Here's what I'm wondering about. The food seen for rich people has dramatically improved in the last 30 years. One way to think of this is rich Californians setting an example of "slow-food" / embracing unproductivity at every link of the supply chain to side-step all the grain subsidies and other perverse incentives. What we're seeing now is the beginning of others cooking for you as a non-luxury item. This is good. I think this means a lot of that bad stuff will be harder to at the same price-point. This is bad for me but perhaps good for society. Anecdotally, I feel like after getting better for a long time, delivery food has been getting worse in NYC as the margins get tighter and competition fiercer. There's two outcomes; - we all eat like shit, as increasingly not only is ordering cheaper than cooking, but the expectation of ordering means people will not be able to afford to take time off to cook[1] - Or, since nothing motivates political action like the loss of privilege within leaving memory, this will put new wind in the sails of the fight against the grain subsidies. [1]: Employment always takes a greater share of our time despite productivity improvements, probably due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. this is Capitalism's #1 bug.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  > others cooking for you as a non-luxury item Interestingly, this sounds more like a regression, since in most urban but poor countries it's already cheaper to eat out than prepare food yourself. This comes down to the cost of labor: a restaurant can buy in bulk cheaper than you can and prepare in batches larger than you can, so they'll be cheaper than you as long as their labor cost doesn't obliterate the advantage. In Europe or Australia it does, so eating out is a luxury; in India or China it does not. Obviously this is a generalization, there are countries that buck the trend (eg Japan) and some meals that are still cheaper to DIY. But I don't think we'll get to techno-utopia here until robotic food preparation goes from gimmick to mass market, and we're still a long way off.
throwanem 6y ago
I hope the copy writer got paid up front. With almost half a billion in VC debt, GhostKitchens can afford it.
- bhupy 6y ago
  The writer is ex + early Uber, I'm sure he's doing fine.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Well, they do say organic is best if you can get it.
adamonkey 6y ago
Rent is typically only 7% of total restaurant operations costs. See Chipotle's quarterly earnings filings for example, and any restaurant industry analyses. Labor and food costs make up 60% of costs, with them being roughly equally divided. Restaurant margins are around 5-7%. I don't see how CloudKitchens is supposed to fundamentally alter the restaurant industry, making it cheaper. Maybe I'm missing something.
- Spivak 6y ago
  And if these kinds of kitchens really catch on I can see existing restaurant owners running more than one brand out of their kitchen to try and reduce downtime. Chuck-e-cheese and Chilies are already trying this.
- clean_send 6y ago
  One of the biggest problems of a kitchen is having food go bad. Nightly we have to throw away food because we don’t have another purpose for it. When serving a singular cuisine it is tough to find ways to create new dishes that fit into the menu. Ghost kitchens become interesting because assuming you’re running 3-10 “restaurants” out of the space, the overlap in ingredients becomes large which allows us to reuse and repurpose ingredients easily. This plus the volume of orders allows us again to reduce overhead costs of purchasing. Often times, it takes the same amount of effort to cook for 50 covers vs 500 but clearly the latter yields more profit.
  - ryanchants 6y ago
    I can't find any information on how inventory management works to see that kitchen waste would be improved. I see two options: 1) Common inventory, in which case I risk running out of ingredients I need for my kitchen, or the inventory of the facility still has to overstock. 2) I can have my inventory delivered, which still means I have waste to produced. And if I want to support local farms, is that an option, or is all of my food coming from US Foods/Syscon/etc?
  - vidanay 6y ago
    I'd like to see a willingness for restaurants to say "I'm sorry, but we are out of that this evening." This would help eliminate food waste by not having to make a batch of something for only 1-2 customers.
yalogin 6y ago
Many of the restaurants that can go delivery only already did, like pizza places and some Chinese restaurants. But the problem is two fold, many food items don’t lend themselves to delivery, and then delivery itself is expensive and doesn’t scale either. A large part of the restaurant experience is dining in, even if that doesn’t include the hospitality, the freshly prepared food will be irreplaceable. The moment it’s packed in boxes a lot of the food loses its edge and items prepared by many chefs will all seem similar. If this concept takes it will take the quality of food down globally. However I am highly skeptical about it and the main reason is delivery, which I still think is a fundamentally unviable business.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I see your point and agree, for the best food you will want to go and find a table near the kitchen. However much of the market doesn't prioritize the best food as highly as convenience. They will happily order for delivery and get food of a somewhat lower quality for the added convenience. Even if delivery is more expensive than managing dine-in customers they will be willing to pay for that convenience For example I often have friends over and it often makes more sense to order in than busy myself with cooking or traveling to a restaurant and coming back to continue our game/karaoke/whatever. I think there is a large market and various points along the quality/price/convenience tradeoff have the ability to be profitable. There will probably always be a market for fine-dining and always be a market for delivery. There will also be a market for various points in between.
- mertd 6y ago
  Maybe after not paying high street retail rent and wait staff salaries, margins go high enough to allow delivery, and don't forget the workday lunch market, which is more about convenience and sustenance.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  The problem I have with arguments that are bearish on food delivery is that they are all focused on supply-chain challenges and ignore the obvious massive demand for the product. Of all the problems you can have in business, the only one that cannot be overcome is a lack of demand. Widespread 1-day delivery of retail goods would have seemed totally absurd and unscalable just 20 years ago ("What, are we gonna FedEx overnight everything? Ridiculous!") and yet here we are. When there is demand, supply will rise to meet it almost every time. Someone will figure out the logistics to make this work and become the Amazon of food (perhaps Amazon?).
kyrra 6y ago
For those that haven't been following this, CloudKitchens[0] is a still somewhat stealth "startup". It was started by Travis Kalanick (of Uber fame) and he has been doing a fairly good job keeping it hidden[1]. [0] https://www.cloudkitchens.com/ https://www.cloudkitchens.com/ [1] https://www.ft.com/content/769409f1-fb0b-4761-b2aa-e75b9792c514 https://www.ft.com/content/769409f1-fb0b-4761-b2aa-e75b9792c...
- RankingMember 6y ago
  Here's hoping they can keep the culture from being as toxic as Uber's was under his tenure.
- raghavtoshniwal 6y ago
  Fwiw, the guy who wrote this article is ex-Uber and was involved in Policy and Strategy for Uber India. Probably has privileged access to Kalanick’s new venture.
- foobarian 6y ago
  Wonder if one part of their secret sauce will be skirting health code.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    Do you mean the kitchen skirting codes or the tenants? I don't know that much about health codes, but my guess is that they are not expensive to follow beyond the cost of having suitable equipment, which is something they probably won't be able to avoid.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      Health codes in saner municipalities which are the municipalities occupied with people that have the most disposable income are extremely expensive to follow as they dictate enormous number of variables, ranging from what can be stored and how to what kind of cooking process one must follow. For example, AC banned partially pre-cooking of poultry around 2012(?) at which point Revel's restaurant had to can its most ordered and one of the most profitable dishes as its guests were not interested in waiting for nearly an hour for a chicken to be cooked from scratch. They used to partially cook it, stick it into the fridge, wait for the order and finish cooking it in ~15-20 minutes. It was a total disaster for the restaurant.
kippinitreal 6y ago
I’m pretty bullish on this concept finding market fit, probably less confident about the business model being great. The super interesting feature IMO is how much this lowers the cost to enter the market. I imagine this are super short term leases (maybe...per shift?), no need for POS, simple bulk ordering etc. shifting capex to opex for small businesses will open up the market to a lot of new entrants. I think a comparison to AWS is fair here. On the financial side, it sort of seems like a race to the bottom for the landlords. I don’t think they’ll have anything like the lock-in AWS has and given how significant the expense will be I would imagine teams being pretty willing to jump for a small savings (which goes to straight to the bottom line). IMO this would be a great move by one of the apps to own, as controlling distribution would lock tenants in.
- michaelyoshika 6y ago
  +1 I think this is the infra revolution we need.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    It makes sense but I don't see the benefit of Deliveroo type companies operating them. Better results would come out of a more organic approach.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      It would be a great way to diversify the offerings for people who want to start a small restaurant. A lot of cities don't have certain types of cuisines. This could be an option for a new immigrant to introduce their food to a new market. And for those who see a bigger picture, renting these ghost kitchens to new immigrants on a Kitchen-as-a-Service model.
- ss3000 6y ago
  I'm bullish on the concept and business model from an investment standpoint, I think they are likely going to become very successful, but as a consumer I can't say I'm looking forward to delivery platforms being flooded with these "cloud kitchens". It seems to be designed to enable mediocre restaurants to "pivot" at a moment's notice and rebrand themselves after building up a well-deserved crappy reputation, ready to start anew and fool more unsuspecting consumers. On the other side of the coin, well-loved restaurants could disappear at a moments notice because the owner/chef got tired of making the same type of cuisine and want to experiment with something new or more lucrative/trendy. I think the agility this model offers restaurants is both a blessing and a curse in this sense, as with traditional restaurants the physical presence involved makes the brand more enduring, for better or worse.
gorgoiler 6y ago
At some point in my life I became extremely fussy about wanting to know where my food came from — particularly the meat — and the conditions under which all of it was produced. Vegetables, cereals, meat, dairy, the lot. No more spring onions from farms employing exploited labour. Certainly nothing imported from countries without labour regulations or farming standards. No more indoor only “free range” chicken etc. I’ve met the cows I eat and the hipsters who grow my cabbage. Both are very pleasant and show no signs of duress. All my suppliers have first names and Instagram accounts. There’s lots of evidence, alongside the produce itself, to cross reference their credentials. The market exists for more expensive, more carefully reared and more kindly cultivated produce of all kinds. I trust only a handful of restaurants to get these details right and have had to accept that eating out is even more of a luxury than it used to be. None of the trusted restaurants are the local ghost kitchens, nor are they likely to be. Competing on price and efficient goes completely against the, ahem, grain. I don’t want food to be cheap, fast, or efficient, and rarely — if ever — to be prepared by strangers I will never meet.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  > I don’t want food to be cheap, fast, or efficient, and rarely — if ever — to be prepared by strangers I will never meet. This is a mode of existence available to only the extremely privileged. It's a great luxury to be this picky about what you eat.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    It might feel like a privilege to those stuck in a major metropolis. Out here in a fairly rural second tier city, it’s a way of life. (Though perhaps my privilege is that I can “afford” to live away from a major population centre? I’m a high school teacher. Demand for my skills is spread more widely than most tech jobs.)
    - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
      Pretty sure there's plenty of people in rural second tier cities who don't get enough to eat, before any consideration of the cow's instagram following.
LaserToy 6y ago
Is anyone interested in working there? I know they are looking for strong SWEs. dm me (y<username> at gmail.com) if interested.
- thor24 6y ago
  Any chance of sponsoring canadian work permit or hiring only in SF/US?
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  It's crazy how easy it is to rehabilitate your image in the valley. There's literally a book written about early Uber's toxic work culture yet I'm sure you'll get tons of message from those willing to work for Kalanick.
  - LaserToy 6y ago
    I did read the book and i didn't find anything too toxic. Especially is you compare it to other industry giants (hello stack ranking and sports team mentality.)
oramit 6y ago
How often do other HN users get takeout and delivery in an average week? For myself I usually grab one takeout meal a week. I haven't had food delivered in years. The proliferation and mainstreaming of food delivery with all the food apps is one of those big trends that totally passed me by. I'm not really happy about the whole thing since it seems to only be working because of squeezed independent restaurants, low paid gig-workers, and lots of VC cash injections. In it's current incarnation, it's not really sustainable but with Covid killing off a huge swath of restaurants that calculus has totally changed. I expect that to only last for a while though. Restaurant people are an independent and cantankerous group. Ghost kitchens might be a good place to start - like food trucks - but most will want to move on to their own place eventually.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Even before COVID there were a lot of trends supporting food ordering among the working class: depression, anxiety, car-lessness, weed legalization, etc. I'm not happy about the volume I've been hitting ranging from maybe 2-5 times a week.
  - oramit 6y ago
    Yeah, if you don't have the space to cook in, or are shuffling between multiple jobs and don't have time to shop/cook then takeout is the only real option. I'm not knocking takeout and delivery at all. The huge proliferation of it is just alien to how I operate so it's interesting to hear what other people are up to.
    - tmpz22 6y ago
      I knock the monopolistic-capture by organizations like Ubereats who have to take a huge chunk to justify their VC investment. Restaurants need every ounce of margin they can get if they're ever going to have a hope of adequately compensating waiters, linecooks, and other staff, who are extremely exposed to covid and poorly treated in general - not to mention drivers.
- raiyu 6y ago
lancesells 6y ago
> better for restaurants and chefs by lowering the entry barrier to start a business Ultimately this winds up better for the owner of the CloudKitchens and worse for restaurants and most likely consumers. Already these services create their own restaurants to compete with the businesses paying them for the space. How long before they are using the data of a successful place to create a knockoff that ranks higher? It's probably already happened.
rsynnott 6y ago
> As with any new technology, Not a technology. > the naysayers have already published conclusive takes on why this is an episode from Black Mirror This is a fairly dismissive treatment; it's quite reasonable to raise concerns about this sort of new business practice. All in all, a strange, low-content article.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I think they mean "technology" in the modern Silicon Valley sense of financial tech, commodification of services, and eventual monopoly rent seeking.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pragmatic 6y ago
"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." That's a strong claim.
chrisgd 6y ago
In 18 months, if there is a vaccine, won’t the demand for delivery decrease? I order food now for delivery I have no interest in delivering once it is safe to go out.
johngalt 6y ago
This seems very ambitious: "It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." It depends on how many variables you bake into the equation. Such as the total time cost spent shopping/storing/cooking/cleaning vs ordering. The amount of food waste in a home kitchen vs commercial. Economies of scale implied in commercial food preparation vs home etc... It's certainly conceivable to have the overall costs be similar. Or at least close enough that it becomes an irrelevant change to improve convenience. In the same way that we could all grow our own potatoes for less than the store cost, but we don't.
welearnednothng 6y ago
I was introduced to the idea of ghost kitchens a couple years ago. Initially, I was pretty keen on the idea. But at the time, we already had ghost kitchens operating in LA, and since then we've seen more open up. What have I not seen? Cheaper costs as a result. Now, delivery apps are flooded with a bunch of companies I've never heard of, I don't know if they're good, I don't know if I can trust them, and at the end of the day they're simply not cheaper for the consumer (one of the touted advantages). I still think the idea has potential, and it sounded like Cloud Kitchens was genuinely doing some innovative stuff (I interviewed with them﹡), but I'm not convinced that potential will actually be realized. If the market shows it is willing to bear $X for some Nashville hot chicken, what motivation does an operator in a ghost kitchen have to undercut that rather than try to increase their razor thin margins? At the end of the day, my excitement around the idea is around enabling entrepreneurial chefs, but it's sort of like a talent show - for every 1 great talent, there will be hundreds of less stellar entries, plus the inevitable business folks. It's an interesting idea, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out over the coming years. That said, I'm more likely to support good brick and mortar companies that help build up the neighborhood community (especially in a city like LA that generally lacks a sense of community). ﹡They spent more time touting their FAANGU(ber) employees than selling the company and ultimately the in-person experience was one of my most loathed interview experiences. This was awhile ago, things could have improved since then.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > They spent more time touting their FAANGU(ber) employees To me this seems like a major red flag and one more sign of them planning to build an engineering playground as opposed to actually solving the problem their business claims to want to solve.
panabee 6y ago
ghost kitchens serve companies, but who has the ingredients (pun intended) to serve consumers with fresh, personalized meals? * fresh ingredients? * locations near consumers? * food and cooking licenses? * space for cooking equipment? amazon, by way of its whole foods acquisition. whole foods already uses humans to create personalized coffee, juices, sandwiches, and burritos on demand. it would be unsurprising if they are exploring robots to automate simple meal preparation and expand into other areas.
Ijumfs 6y ago
>It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself. No, no it won't. Why would a person claim something so ridiculous? I can understand if you never leave your little Soho / Bay bubble, but do real actual people honestly think this?
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  This seems to be already the case in India with the Dabbawalla system [1], so it's not an outrageous idea - it's simply replacing home cooks with tiny commercial kitchens. They can buy produce in bulk at much cheaper rates than you'll find at your grocery store. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala
  - Ijumfs 6y ago
    It's not the case, because it's not possible for food to be cheaper after prep and delivery. It's cheap, but not cheaper than making your own food from scratch. And there's no oversight or health inspections for this mass prepared food either. But you know this, it's why you said "seems to be" instead of "is," very nicely done.
    - ricardobeat 6y ago
      You're completely ignoring the food cost I just mentioned. For example, the cost of a Big Mac is around 1 dollar. Try making a burger with ingredients from the supermarket for $1, it is impossible. Things easily cost 5-10x as much in retail vs their bulk prices, it is much cheaper to cook for 50 customers at once than for a single meal. This system is removing all of the other costs of operating a restaurant, so unless you also buy ingredients in 50kg bags for your home, they can definitely make it cheaper.
trynewideas 6y ago
Cloud kitchens also consolidate geographically associated, demographically rich, heavily identifiable consumer data in ways we haven't seen outside of retail, and with more richness and more intimacy than retail is capable of. Amazon might sell you everything else ever made, but they aren't feeding you a hot meal, not learning what you're in the mood for, what you like to share with your friends and family, what experiences you prefer and reject down to individual condiments on an individual item, not yet, and then find you and physically go to you where you live, and where you work, and where you hang out — these vertical cloud kitchens will. This is a goldmine for a very narrow slice of the tech economy, and like many tech disruptors the efficiency gains wrung out of the model won't make your life better as much as it will hurt the places you already use, all to benefit someone else the most. The price or quality won't (and in places where these are already common, doesn't) matter as much as the information these extremely vertical operations can aggregate.
balthasar 6y ago
Not sure if this is mentioned but it sounds similar to another restaurant disruption that gained ground recently, I'm talking about redesigned food courts. The idea was an artisanal food courts that chefs could rent stalls in. I am sure they are still around but I know there was a lot of fuss over their exploitative practices.

133 points by MKais 6y ago

0898 6y ago

"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." I doubt this very much.

Ericson2314 6y ago
It is possible, but for bad reasons: food won't become that cheap in isolation, but in conjunction with the marginal cost of taking the time to cook being greater. If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. If you live in a food desert working 3 part time jobs, the above is probably already true and you survive off convenience store non-perishables and fast food.
- 0898 6y ago
  You mean if you factor in your time? Okay: in that case maybe.
  - rosseloh 6y ago
    I can't comment on the actual subject at hand (I haven't read the article yet nor really done any research on this), but you absolutely have to factor in your time. I like to cook. If my home situation was a little bit different, I'd probably cook full proper meals every night, no questions asked. It would take me at minimum an hour each night, and often more when you include prep and cleaning (which you should, they're integral parts of cooking a meal). Combine that with long hours at work and the fact that I like to at least get some leisure time in my day along with sleep, and those hours add up. I've actually taken to eating mostly frozen food (stuff that still requires a little prep, not TV dinners, mind you), because it's a little faster and the cleanup is easier(stick some frozen chicken on foil in the oven and the cleanup is "throw the foil away"). When I don't do that, I'm meal-prepping on sunday afternoons, which takes four or more hours out of my precious weekend (with the exchange of being able to just microwave whatever I'm eating for lunch and dinner that week, again saving time). Yes, where I live, groceries cost far less than anything you can get at a restaurant. And I'm hesitant to say that this will go anywhere, because it really seems like a long shot. But if it does get somewhere...the dollar cost of groceries is not the only thing to focus on. Time spent making meals absolutely matters.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      Time spent making meals is a dead time. Those that do not consider that to be a dead time simply buy instapots, slow cookers and rice cookers.
    - devchix 6y ago
      I tell my work mates I spend probably 8+ hours in the kitchen during the weekend doing meal prep and they are some combination of aghast and disbelieving. Yes, 8+ if you want to eat decent, we're not being fancy. You can't just get groceries and come home to stuff them in the fridge. They need to be semi-prepped: unwrapped, minor cleaning, portioning out. Herbs and greens need to be washed and stored properly or they'll spoil. Want good soup? Have to break down the chicken to make stock, defat and freeze it. There's also the planning aspect, if you wake up on Saturday and start the grocery list, it's too late. I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. It's a huge time suck and if I factor in the cost of my time it's exorbitant. Having said all that, there is no reasonable alternative for me, right now. Everything else is garbage or unpalatable or exorbitant, and I still have to do supplemental cooking. I'm resigned to the fact that cooking, eating, cleaning, laundry is all part of living and I can't pay for all of it to go away. I'm trying to be a better planner, and chop and peel faster.
      - rosseloh 6y ago
        > I like to say "I like cooking", but most of cooking is drudgery: peel carrots, potatoes, break down chicken, trim the meat, manage food portion and storage. Totally. I love cooking. But when I say I love cooking, I mean I love standing over a pot or pan, stirring, tasting, seasoning, and sauteing. Prep work is the worst part, and also often the part that takes the longest.
        throw7 6y ago
        I love prep work! Cutting down a whole chicken.... chopping, prepping the mise en place. I find it really relaxing. :) seriously. Love the cooking part also too... what I hate is the dishwashing!
- michaelt 6y ago
  > If you are an anxious overachieving professional, the above is probably already true and you survive off fast casual. Is this the case where you live? In my country, daily restaurant eating is less a sign of success, and more a sign of not knowing how to cook, which is a source of embarrassment for most overachieving professionals.
  - macNchz 6y ago
    In NYC at least there is certainly a subset of ambitious professional types who derive some kind of pride at being incompetent at everything other than their job. I think it's humblebrag type thing where they show off a) how overworked they are all the time, which is a perverse status symbol here b) how they can afford to pay someone to do everything in their lives for them.
    - aqme28 6y ago
      You can even rent an apartment here that doesn't have a kitchen.
idiot900 6y ago
This has already been true for a long time in high cost of living places like Manhattan, where groceries can be expensive and time is at a premium. It was certainly the case for me for years.
- gpapilion 6y ago
  I found this to be true before having kids. The waste was so high it pushed the cost up for groceries. After increasing the number of mouths I find delivery to be much higher.
- notyourday 6y ago
  That's simply not true. Even if one buys all his or her ingredients at bodegas he will still beat the prices of the delivered food, not to mention that the cheap delivery food is basically low quality junk food.
amf12 6y ago
I too doubt it will be as cheap, but scale and other related (but not accounted for) costs could make it similar. For example time spent cooking, grocery shopping, gas (cooking + fuel*), etc. One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. These don't apply to cloud kitchens. More so, the cloud kitchens are not in a very popular high-rent area. However, cloud kitchens can increase competition resulting into less profit.
- joosters 6y ago
  One major expense for a restaurant is rental costs for a dine-in area. That is what makes a restaurant a restaurant, rather than a takeaway. Restaurants didn't end up with dine-in areas by accident, nor do they offer in-house dining as some kind of loss-leader, they have it by choice because it makes them more money! (that is, pre-Covid, of course...)
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? I think that was true in certain situations, but very hard to pull off in general. We are seeing a shift away from restaurants as a luxury good, and in doing so I think the mythos of white table cloths, domestic labor cos-playing, etc. will go away. That, in turn, was I think a big part how they raised margins, so I think the basic cloud kitchen premise is correct.
    - xnyan 6y ago
      >Huh? Are you saying the restaurant can suck more rent from dinners than the landlord from them? It's hard, but many do it. The biggest advantage sit-down has is "addons", primarily booze. Breaking even on the food and making a profit on beer, wine, and cocktails is very common. Cocktails are intended to be drunk at the time of mix, and I have better quality and cheaper wine and beer already at home. No reason to order it with delivery. Also when you're in the restaurant, you can (and are encouraged to) keep ordering more food vs a one time transaction on your phone.
    - 6y ago
peteretep 6y ago
In Bangkok, this is very true already for me
crazygringo 6y ago
Exactly. Until preparation and delivery become roboticized, it is absolutely not true. I live in New York City, eat meat, and it's easy to spend only ~$300/mo. on groceries for the month if you're paying attention to prices and cooking yourself. That's $3.25 per meal. Please show me how exactly I can get nutritious full prepared meals at this price, let alone delivered...
- m463 6y ago
  I noticed sometimes that frozen dinners in the supermarket are sometimes 10/$10. Maybe this doesn't qualify as "full" (or possibly even "nutritious") but could food preservation figure into it? also, recognize there is a demand. Another thing I think about, is that probably in the 90's (the era of the CD) I remember meeting someone who worked in digital music (this was so long ago I can't recall who). But I remember what he said "in the future, digital music will probably cost like 10 or 20 cents a song or less". I couldn't imagine it at the time. Could the same happen with food? Maybe there's a lot of overhead built into our current model of getting "cheap" groceries and cooking. Could $300/mo on groceries be expensive compared to buying component items like flour or rice or salt? and what if delivery brought a week of meals instead of one-offs?
- wenc 6y ago
  I suspect it is possible, but margins will be very tight and will require volume/scale and velocity. Velocity (in money) is an unintuitive concept (Returns = Margin * Velocity), but it's how many ethnic grocers get returns on relatively low margins. (that, and tremendous cost control, staffing with family members, different supply chains, etc.) $300/mth sounds about right (I checked mine, ~$325 in Chicago, at big box grocery stores, eating healthy, lots of meat and produce). There was a time when I was shopping exclusively at ethnic groceries and my average was ~$200/mth ($50/wk).
- LaserToy 6y ago
  I’m curious - how much do you earn per hour and how many hours do you spend on cooking/shopping/cleaning per month?
  - 6y ago
WC3w6pXxgGd 6y ago
Economies of scale. Same reason a Chipotle is almost the same price as preparing your own burrito.
ponker 6y ago
I don't know how it's going to happen (if I did, I'd be a billionaire) but I am pretty confident for the same reasons that I don't build my own mobile phones or furniture or sew my own clothes, I eventually won't cook my own food, except as a hobby the same way people make their own furniture and clothes today. I can't make a McChicken sandwich for $1.39 so in some ways we're already there.
blackoil 6y ago
It may be possible if you reduce menu choices to 4-5 / day and sell monthly pass i.e. you'll have to buy at least 20 meals a month. This will allow for bulk cooking and bundle delivery to reduce the costs. Fixed demand allows you to predict cost and expenditure.
smoe 6y ago
Think it depends on your living situation. I have been living alone for a long time, but was used to having lunch in cafeterias / restaurants and only cook on weekends mostly. Over the last months of working from home, deciding to cook for myself ~90% of the time, it took me quite a while to figure out a good balance between being cost/time effective, having little waste as well as being reasonably diverse and fresh. E.g. what I have seen some times, that people food prep on Sunday 5x the same lunch to eat during the week, absolutely does not work for me. It is cheaper than having food delivered, but only if I don't count my own time. If I didn't actually like cooking or weren't reasonably good at it, I would order food most of the days.
jkinudsjknds 6y ago
I think a generous VC could make it last for a while.
Nextgrid 6y ago
It will never become cheaper because VC scum needs to eat and pay thousands of developers to constantly rebuild their engineering playground. Let's assume for a second that it is actually cheaper for the company (a very big "if" considering the profitability of current delivery operations), do you really think they'd just pass on the savings to you, as opposed to pocketing them and/or wasting them?

Ericson2314 6y ago

WeWork for kitchens is an interesting mixed bag. > It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yoursel The techno-utopianist I cannot beat out of me is excited. It is rediculous that we avoid economies of scale to save money. > Drivers Damn, to think the rest of the US is doing car delivery is ridiculous. NYC's ubiquitous bike delivery is a great example of why density is just more efficient. > > The “ghost kitchen” would change all of that. In place of small businesses there would only be a series of tractor trailers staffed with interchangeable “freelance contractors” cooking, presumably with no benefits or fixed hours. Lol I don't think much people get benefits at restaurants already. Still, the quote is absolutely correct, they won't start getting it either. IMO every "gig work" company should be pushing hard as hell for universal healthcare etc., as removes a huge competitive advantage of their competition. Do it for the $$ not the altruism, if you must. ----- Here's what I'm wondering about. The food seen for rich people has dramatically improved in the last 30 years. One way to think of this is rich Californians setting an example of "slow-food" / embracing unproductivity at every link of the supply chain to side-step all the grain subsidies and other perverse incentives. What we're seeing now is the beginning of others cooking for you as a non-luxury item. This is good. I think this means a lot of that bad stuff will be harder to at the same price-point. This is bad for me but perhaps good for society. Anecdotally, I feel like after getting better for a long time, delivery food has been getting worse in NYC as the margins get tighter and competition fiercer. There's two outcomes; - we all eat like shit, as increasingly not only is ordering cheaper than cooking, but the expectation of ordering means people will not be able to afford to take time off to cook[1] - Or, since nothing motivates political action like the loss of privilege within leaving memory, this will put new wind in the sails of the fight against the grain subsidies. [1]: Employment always takes a greater share of our time despite productivity improvements, probably due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. this is Capitalism's #1 bug.

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
> others cooking for you as a non-luxury item Interestingly, this sounds more like a regression, since in most urban but poor countries it's already cheaper to eat out than prepare food yourself. This comes down to the cost of labor: a restaurant can buy in bulk cheaper than you can and prepare in batches larger than you can, so they'll be cheaper than you as long as their labor cost doesn't obliterate the advantage. In Europe or Australia it does, so eating out is a luxury; in India or China it does not. Obviously this is a generalization, there are countries that buck the trend (eg Japan) and some meals that are still cheaper to DIY. But I don't think we'll get to techno-utopia here until robotic food preparation goes from gimmick to mass market, and we're still a long way off.

throwanem 6y ago

I hope the copy writer got paid up front. With almost half a billion in VC debt, GhostKitchens can afford it.

bhupy 6y ago
The writer is ex + early Uber, I'm sure he's doing fine.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Well, they do say organic is best if you can get it.

adamonkey 6y ago

Rent is typically only 7% of total restaurant operations costs. See Chipotle's quarterly earnings filings for example, and any restaurant industry analyses. Labor and food costs make up 60% of costs, with them being roughly equally divided. Restaurant margins are around 5-7%. I don't see how CloudKitchens is supposed to fundamentally alter the restaurant industry, making it cheaper. Maybe I'm missing something.

Spivak 6y ago
And if these kinds of kitchens really catch on I can see existing restaurant owners running more than one brand out of their kitchen to try and reduce downtime. Chuck-e-cheese and Chilies are already trying this.
clean_send 6y ago
One of the biggest problems of a kitchen is having food go bad. Nightly we have to throw away food because we don’t have another purpose for it. When serving a singular cuisine it is tough to find ways to create new dishes that fit into the menu. Ghost kitchens become interesting because assuming you’re running 3-10 “restaurants” out of the space, the overlap in ingredients becomes large which allows us to reuse and repurpose ingredients easily. This plus the volume of orders allows us again to reduce overhead costs of purchasing. Often times, it takes the same amount of effort to cook for 50 covers vs 500 but clearly the latter yields more profit.
- ryanchants 6y ago
  I can't find any information on how inventory management works to see that kitchen waste would be improved. I see two options: 1) Common inventory, in which case I risk running out of ingredients I need for my kitchen, or the inventory of the facility still has to overstock. 2) I can have my inventory delivered, which still means I have waste to produced. And if I want to support local farms, is that an option, or is all of my food coming from US Foods/Syscon/etc?
- vidanay 6y ago
  I'd like to see a willingness for restaurants to say "I'm sorry, but we are out of that this evening." This would help eliminate food waste by not having to make a batch of something for only 1-2 customers.

yalogin 6y ago

Many of the restaurants that can go delivery only already did, like pizza places and some Chinese restaurants. But the problem is two fold, many food items don’t lend themselves to delivery, and then delivery itself is expensive and doesn’t scale either. A large part of the restaurant experience is dining in, even if that doesn’t include the hospitality, the freshly prepared food will be irreplaceable. The moment it’s packed in boxes a lot of the food loses its edge and items prepared by many chefs will all seem similar. If this concept takes it will take the quality of food down globally. However I am highly skeptical about it and the main reason is delivery, which I still think is a fundamentally unviable business.

kevincox 6y ago
I see your point and agree, for the best food you will want to go and find a table near the kitchen. However much of the market doesn't prioritize the best food as highly as convenience. They will happily order for delivery and get food of a somewhat lower quality for the added convenience. Even if delivery is more expensive than managing dine-in customers they will be willing to pay for that convenience For example I often have friends over and it often makes more sense to order in than busy myself with cooking or traveling to a restaurant and coming back to continue our game/karaoke/whatever. I think there is a large market and various points along the quality/price/convenience tradeoff have the ability to be profitable. There will probably always be a market for fine-dining and always be a market for delivery. There will also be a market for various points in between.
mertd 6y ago
Maybe after not paying high street retail rent and wait staff salaries, margins go high enough to allow delivery, and don't forget the workday lunch market, which is more about convenience and sustenance.
santoshalper 6y ago
The problem I have with arguments that are bearish on food delivery is that they are all focused on supply-chain challenges and ignore the obvious massive demand for the product. Of all the problems you can have in business, the only one that cannot be overcome is a lack of demand. Widespread 1-day delivery of retail goods would have seemed totally absurd and unscalable just 20 years ago ("What, are we gonna FedEx overnight everything? Ridiculous!") and yet here we are. When there is demand, supply will rise to meet it almost every time. Someone will figure out the logistics to make this work and become the Amazon of food (perhaps Amazon?).

kyrra 6y ago

For those that haven't been following this, CloudKitchens[0] is a still somewhat stealth "startup". It was started by Travis Kalanick (of Uber fame) and he has been doing a fairly good job keeping it hidden[1]. [0] https://www.cloudkitchens.com/ https://www.cloudkitchens.com/ [1] https://www.ft.com/content/769409f1-fb0b-4761-b2aa-e75b9792c514 https://www.ft.com/content/769409f1-fb0b-4761-b2aa-e75b9792c...

RankingMember 6y ago
Here's hoping they can keep the culture from being as toxic as Uber's was under his tenure.
raghavtoshniwal 6y ago
Fwiw, the guy who wrote this article is ex-Uber and was involved in Policy and Strategy for Uber India. Probably has privileged access to Kalanick’s new venture.
foobarian 6y ago
Wonder if one part of their secret sauce will be skirting health code.
- thebean11 6y ago
  Do you mean the kitchen skirting codes or the tenants? I don't know that much about health codes, but my guess is that they are not expensive to follow beyond the cost of having suitable equipment, which is something they probably won't be able to avoid.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    Health codes in saner municipalities which are the municipalities occupied with people that have the most disposable income are extremely expensive to follow as they dictate enormous number of variables, ranging from what can be stored and how to what kind of cooking process one must follow. For example, AC banned partially pre-cooking of poultry around 2012(?) at which point Revel's restaurant had to can its most ordered and one of the most profitable dishes as its guests were not interested in waiting for nearly an hour for a chicken to be cooked from scratch. They used to partially cook it, stick it into the fridge, wait for the order and finish cooking it in ~15-20 minutes. It was a total disaster for the restaurant.

kippinitreal 6y ago

I’m pretty bullish on this concept finding market fit, probably less confident about the business model being great. The super interesting feature IMO is how much this lowers the cost to enter the market. I imagine this are super short term leases (maybe...per shift?), no need for POS, simple bulk ordering etc. shifting capex to opex for small businesses will open up the market to a lot of new entrants. I think a comparison to AWS is fair here. On the financial side, it sort of seems like a race to the bottom for the landlords. I don’t think they’ll have anything like the lock-in AWS has and given how significant the expense will be I would imagine teams being pretty willing to jump for a small savings (which goes to straight to the bottom line). IMO this would be a great move by one of the apps to own, as controlling distribution would lock tenants in.

michaelyoshika 6y ago
+1 I think this is the infra revolution we need.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  It makes sense but I don't see the benefit of Deliveroo type companies operating them. Better results would come out of a more organic approach.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    It would be a great way to diversify the offerings for people who want to start a small restaurant. A lot of cities don't have certain types of cuisines. This could be an option for a new immigrant to introduce their food to a new market. And for those who see a bigger picture, renting these ghost kitchens to new immigrants on a Kitchen-as-a-Service model.
ss3000 6y ago
I'm bullish on the concept and business model from an investment standpoint, I think they are likely going to become very successful, but as a consumer I can't say I'm looking forward to delivery platforms being flooded with these "cloud kitchens". It seems to be designed to enable mediocre restaurants to "pivot" at a moment's notice and rebrand themselves after building up a well-deserved crappy reputation, ready to start anew and fool more unsuspecting consumers. On the other side of the coin, well-loved restaurants could disappear at a moments notice because the owner/chef got tired of making the same type of cuisine and want to experiment with something new or more lucrative/trendy. I think the agility this model offers restaurants is both a blessing and a curse in this sense, as with traditional restaurants the physical presence involved makes the brand more enduring, for better or worse.

gorgoiler 6y ago

At some point in my life I became extremely fussy about wanting to know where my food came from — particularly the meat — and the conditions under which all of it was produced. Vegetables, cereals, meat, dairy, the lot. No more spring onions from farms employing exploited labour. Certainly nothing imported from countries without labour regulations or farming standards. No more indoor only “free range” chicken etc. I’ve met the cows I eat and the hipsters who grow my cabbage. Both are very pleasant and show no signs of duress. All my suppliers have first names and Instagram accounts. There’s lots of evidence, alongside the produce itself, to cross reference their credentials. The market exists for more expensive, more carefully reared and more kindly cultivated produce of all kinds. I trust only a handful of restaurants to get these details right and have had to accept that eating out is even more of a luxury than it used to be. None of the trusted restaurants are the local ghost kitchens, nor are they likely to be. Competing on price and efficient goes completely against the, ahem, grain. I don’t want food to be cheap, fast, or efficient, and rarely — if ever — to be prepared by strangers I will never meet.

ciarannolan 6y ago
> I don’t want food to be cheap, fast, or efficient, and rarely — if ever — to be prepared by strangers I will never meet. This is a mode of existence available to only the extremely privileged. It's a great luxury to be this picky about what you eat.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  It might feel like a privilege to those stuck in a major metropolis. Out here in a fairly rural second tier city, it’s a way of life. (Though perhaps my privilege is that I can “afford” to live away from a major population centre? I’m a high school teacher. Demand for my skills is spread more widely than most tech jobs.)
  - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
    Pretty sure there's plenty of people in rural second tier cities who don't get enough to eat, before any consideration of the cow's instagram following.

LaserToy 6y ago

Is anyone interested in working there? I know they are looking for strong SWEs. dm me (y<username> at gmail.com) if interested.

thor24 6y ago
Any chance of sponsoring canadian work permit or hiring only in SF/US?
AlexandrB 6y ago
It's crazy how easy it is to rehabilitate your image in the valley. There's literally a book written about early Uber's toxic work culture yet I'm sure you'll get tons of message from those willing to work for Kalanick.
- LaserToy 6y ago
  I did read the book and i didn't find anything too toxic. Especially is you compare it to other industry giants (hello stack ranking and sports team mentality.)

oramit 6y ago

How often do other HN users get takeout and delivery in an average week? For myself I usually grab one takeout meal a week. I haven't had food delivered in years. The proliferation and mainstreaming of food delivery with all the food apps is one of those big trends that totally passed me by. I'm not really happy about the whole thing since it seems to only be working because of squeezed independent restaurants, low paid gig-workers, and lots of VC cash injections. In it's current incarnation, it's not really sustainable but with Covid killing off a huge swath of restaurants that calculus has totally changed. I expect that to only last for a while though. Restaurant people are an independent and cantankerous group. Ghost kitchens might be a good place to start - like food trucks - but most will want to move on to their own place eventually.

tmpz22 6y ago
Even before COVID there were a lot of trends supporting food ordering among the working class: depression, anxiety, car-lessness, weed legalization, etc. I'm not happy about the volume I've been hitting ranging from maybe 2-5 times a week.
- oramit 6y ago
  Yeah, if you don't have the space to cook in, or are shuffling between multiple jobs and don't have time to shop/cook then takeout is the only real option. I'm not knocking takeout and delivery at all. The huge proliferation of it is just alien to how I operate so it's interesting to hear what other people are up to.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    I knock the monopolistic-capture by organizations like Ubereats who have to take a huge chunk to justify their VC investment. Restaurants need every ounce of margin they can get if they're ever going to have a hope of adequately compensating waiters, linecooks, and other staff, who are extremely exposed to covid and poorly treated in general - not to mention drivers.
raiyu 6y ago

lancesells 6y ago

> better for restaurants and chefs by lowering the entry barrier to start a business Ultimately this winds up better for the owner of the CloudKitchens and worse for restaurants and most likely consumers. Already these services create their own restaurants to compete with the businesses paying them for the space. How long before they are using the data of a successful place to create a knockoff that ranks higher? It's probably already happened.

rsynnott 6y ago

> As with any new technology, Not a technology. > the naysayers have already published conclusive takes on why this is an episode from Black Mirror This is a fairly dismissive treatment; it's quite reasonable to raise concerns about this sort of new business practice. All in all, a strange, low-content article.

AlexandrB 6y ago
I think they mean "technology" in the modern Silicon Valley sense of financial tech, commodification of services, and eventual monopoly rent seeking.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pragmatic 6y ago

"It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." That's a strong claim.

chrisgd 6y ago

In 18 months, if there is a vaccine, won’t the demand for delivery decrease? I order food now for delivery I have no interest in delivering once it is safe to go out.

johngalt 6y ago

This seems very ambitious: "It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself." It depends on how many variables you bake into the equation. Such as the total time cost spent shopping/storing/cooking/cleaning vs ordering. The amount of food waste in a home kitchen vs commercial. Economies of scale implied in commercial food preparation vs home etc... It's certainly conceivable to have the overall costs be similar. Or at least close enough that it becomes an irrelevant change to improve convenience. In the same way that we could all grow our own potatoes for less than the store cost, but we don't.

welearnednothng 6y ago

I was introduced to the idea of ghost kitchens a couple years ago. Initially, I was pretty keen on the idea. But at the time, we already had ghost kitchens operating in LA, and since then we've seen more open up. What have I not seen? Cheaper costs as a result. Now, delivery apps are flooded with a bunch of companies I've never heard of, I don't know if they're good, I don't know if I can trust them, and at the end of the day they're simply not cheaper for the consumer (one of the touted advantages). I still think the idea has potential, and it sounded like Cloud Kitchens was genuinely doing some innovative stuff (I interviewed with them﹡), but I'm not convinced that potential will actually be realized. If the market shows it is willing to bear $X for some Nashville hot chicken, what motivation does an operator in a ghost kitchen have to undercut that rather than try to increase their razor thin margins? At the end of the day, my excitement around the idea is around enabling entrepreneurial chefs, but it's sort of like a talent show - for every 1 great talent, there will be hundreds of less stellar entries, plus the inevitable business folks. It's an interesting idea, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out over the coming years. That said, I'm more likely to support good brick and mortar companies that help build up the neighborhood community (especially in a city like LA that generally lacks a sense of community). ﹡They spent more time touting their FAANGU(ber) employees than selling the company and ultimately the in-person experience was one of my most loathed interview experiences. This was awhile ago, things could have improved since then.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> They spent more time touting their FAANGU(ber) employees To me this seems like a major red flag and one more sign of them planning to build an engineering playground as opposed to actually solving the problem their business claims to want to solve.

panabee 6y ago

ghost kitchens serve companies, but who has the ingredients (pun intended) to serve consumers with fresh, personalized meals? * fresh ingredients? * locations near consumers? * food and cooking licenses? * space for cooking equipment? amazon, by way of its whole foods acquisition. whole foods already uses humans to create personalized coffee, juices, sandwiches, and burritos on demand. it would be unsurprising if they are exploring robots to automate simple meal preparation and expand into other areas.

Ijumfs 6y ago

>It will soon be just as cheap to have your food prepared and delivered as going to the grocery store and making it yourself. No, no it won't. Why would a person claim something so ridiculous? I can understand if you never leave your little Soho / Bay bubble, but do real actual people honestly think this?

ricardobeat 6y ago
This seems to be already the case in India with the Dabbawalla system [1], so it's not an outrageous idea - it's simply replacing home cooks with tiny commercial kitchens. They can buy produce in bulk at much cheaper rates than you'll find at your grocery store. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala
- Ijumfs 6y ago
  It's not the case, because it's not possible for food to be cheaper after prep and delivery. It's cheap, but not cheaper than making your own food from scratch. And there's no oversight or health inspections for this mass prepared food either. But you know this, it's why you said "seems to be" instead of "is," very nicely done.
  - ricardobeat 6y ago
    You're completely ignoring the food cost I just mentioned. For example, the cost of a Big Mac is around 1 dollar. Try making a burger with ingredients from the supermarket for $1, it is impossible. Things easily cost 5-10x as much in retail vs their bulk prices, it is much cheaper to cook for 50 customers at once than for a single meal. This system is removing all of the other costs of operating a restaurant, so unless you also buy ingredients in 50kg bags for your home, they can definitely make it cheaper.

trynewideas 6y ago

Cloud kitchens also consolidate geographically associated, demographically rich, heavily identifiable consumer data in ways we haven't seen outside of retail, and with more richness and more intimacy than retail is capable of. Amazon might sell you everything else ever made, but they aren't feeding you a hot meal, not learning what you're in the mood for, what you like to share with your friends and family, what experiences you prefer and reject down to individual condiments on an individual item, not yet, and then find you and physically go to you where you live, and where you work, and where you hang out — these vertical cloud kitchens will. This is a goldmine for a very narrow slice of the tech economy, and like many tech disruptors the efficiency gains wrung out of the model won't make your life better as much as it will hurt the places you already use, all to benefit someone else the most. The price or quality won't (and in places where these are already common, doesn't) matter as much as the information these extremely vertical operations can aggregate.

balthasar 6y ago

Not sure if this is mentioned but it sounds similar to another restaurant disruption that gained ground recently, I'm talking about redesigned food courts. The idea was an artisanal food courts that chefs could rent stalls in. I am sure they are still around but I know there was a lot of fuss over their exploitative practices.