26 ms·

One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants

• woojoo666 4y ago
  This is just a sybil attack without the blockchain
• _jnc 4y ago
  This strikes me as exactly the intent of the cloud kitchen model, not some big reveal.
• jacobkg 4y ago
  When someone pitched the idea of cloud kitchens to me a few years ago, the idea was you would have a centralized facility running multiple kitchens each of which was a single restaurant entity. It made sense as a way to run takeout only operations. It seems like what’s happening now is similar to what happens in Amazon which is the generation of multiple throwaway brands in a bid to flood the marketplace and also farm positive ratings
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    What would this phenomenon be called. "The commodification of everything?"
    • throwaway1851 4y ago
      It needs a term. Something in the neighborhoods of spam and fraud. Spam, because it’s voluminous garbage. Fraud, because it’s an attempt to convince the end buyer that something exists which doesn’t (a distinct product/brand/business).
      • jdauriemma 4y ago
        Gray branding? Label spam?
  • zerocrates 4y ago
    There's also just a branding/targeting phenomenon going on to some extent. Ghost/cloud kitchens even from high-quality sources often have youth-oriented "cool" branding, websites, names of dishes and so on. They're definitely trying to target a different group of customers, at least in some cases. The other aspect I've noticed is that most of these things are laser-targeted in terms of what they offer. Though they operate out of a full-service restaurant they'll offer just burgers, or just wings, etc. I think this one has to do with the way that the delivery apps deaccentuate the actual identities of restaurants: they really encourage you to just search/browse for a type of food, so this is sort of a gaming of that system.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bombcar 4y ago
      This is a huge part of it. People have an idea of what they want and search for that, so a restaurant that appears to specialize in that will get top ranking.
  • mikewhy 4y ago
    So we've reinvented mall food courts without the foot traffic. Kudos, technology.
• bombcar 4y ago
  I’m still kind of surprised people order online from places they’ve never been to. Maybe I’m just pampered.
  • NavinF 4y ago
    Ehh just check reviews. Choosing a restaurant to order from is no different from choosing one to dine in.
    • bpye 4y ago
      I find it pretty hard to trust the ratings in Uber Eats etc. I invariably find that Uber Eats has a high rating when Yelp or Google Maps has a significantly lower rating. Sure the food is only one part of in the restaurant experience but when it’s something like 4.5 v 3 it feels off…
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Searching in yelp or Google first and then looking in Uber/DoorDash can be a way to go. “Fake” restaurants are unlikely to appear in the first two.
  • yawnxyz 4y ago
    If by "pampered" you mean you don't want to be scammed by some popup kitchen that can easily rename/rebrand itself once it amasses a bunch of negative reviews... then yes, you're "pampered". Always better to go to a place that has its reputation on the line.
  • nunsense 4y ago
    • WarChortle 4y ago
      What are you talking about? How did you get all of that from 'Maybe I'm just pampered'. I think he means, I wouldn't order from a restaurant I have never heard from or been to in person. I don't know anyone, at all, who does what you are suggesting in this comment.
• plasma 4y ago
  I ran an Uber Eats-only toasted sandwich business with my brothers for a month as an experiment - we rented a small room with no shopfront, and while we were popular, realised it was difficult to grow revenue when your only source of orders was via the gatekeeper apps (Uber Eats, etc) that take a high margin, and your at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others. This makes me think anyone running a cloud kitchen is going to always be under the thumb of the apps/landlord with no way to expand revenue.
  • charlieyu1 4y ago
    I heard some stories of a food enterprise with a bad reputation in Hong Kong does something similar, open a few takeaway only shops under different names. I guess they having a catering supply chain would help the operation a lot
  • rexf 4y ago
    Yeah, while I don't work in the food industry. As an app developer, I know what it's like to be at the mercy of ASO (for the App Store) and it's not fun. Perhaps it makes financial sense for an existing (non-ghost) restaurants. They can expand their revenue, keep their kitchen busy, etc. So anyone from your local mom n' pop burger place to big chains (IHOP, Applebee's, etc) can run several ghost kitchen brands to increase kitchen utilization.
  • jelling 4y ago
    This is also why business that rely on Google ads suck.
    • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      Or Facebook..
  • thatguy0900 4y ago
    It seems like a popular strategy is to open multiple "resteraunts" out of the same kitchen. Maybe that makes the algorithm positioning issues more stable in aggregate or something.
• ProAm 4y ago
  This is peak RAAS. It's just like all the generic brands on Amazon/Alibaba same company but diversify branding to camouflage yourself among the forest.
  • crooked-v 4y ago
    For it to truly get to the Amazon level, you'll need to start seeing ghost restaurants with gibberish five- or six-letter all-caps names all reselling identical food from Sodexo and Aramark.
    • ec109685 4y ago
      Selling 2TB worth of burgers for $19.99 https://www.amazon.com/gp/slredirect/picassoRedirect.html/ref=pa_sp_phone_search_atf_aps_sr_pg1_1?ie=UTF8&adId=A042128110HKUODVF4CB&url=%2FWaterproof-Memory-Portable-Keychain-Capacity%2Fdp%2FB0B1V57BVW%2Fref%3Dmp_s_a_1_1_sspa%3Fcrid%3D2QFX10TC8UQ3L%26keywords%3D1%2Btb%2Bflash%2Bdrive%26qid%3D1661571975%26sprefix%3D%252Caps%252C255%26sr%3D8-1-spons%26psc%3D1&qualifier=1661571975&id=6140365603593587&widgetName=sp_phone_search_atf https://www.amazon.com/gp/slredirect/picassoRedirect.html/re...
      • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        Wow! Its X-ray proof and has AI!
      • blendergeek 4y ago
        Wow. That is quite the listing. I love the "questions and answers". > Question: What file system is on these 2 TB units? > Answer: I like this product. It's useful for me. Thanks.
        • jon-wood 4y ago
          I was baffled by those Q&As on Amazon, particularly the ones that just said something like “Sorry, I haven’t used that feature” until I received an email from Amazon saying something like “Someone has asked this question about a product you bought, can you answer?” I did what I assume the product managers expected to happen and just ignored it because I didn’t know, but presumably some significant proportion of people will throw some nonsense answer in, and no one at Amazon then checks the question was answered.
• alx__ 4y ago
  I made the mistake of ordering late-night cookies, for stoner reasons. The photos looked decent and ignoring the price gouging I hit SUBMIT They were absolutely terrible, like the garbage frozen cookies that SYSCO sells to restaurants. I bet you know how this ends. Zoomed in on the map where they were supposedly from. And it was a Pizza shop that also sold the same awful cookies.
  • kcplate 4y ago
    Yep. The old wacky tobaccy will make you do that kind of thing. Back in the ‘80s I managed to go through an entire bulk warehouse sized box of Cheezits in an evening… dipping each crispy cheesy square in a quart sized jar of butterscotch Carmel sauce. Good times…
  • tomcam 4y ago
    And that, kids is why...
    • regularjack 4y ago
      ... you always leave a note!
  • randycupertino 4y ago
    This happened to us with late night mac and cheese. There's a pretty awesome local mac and cheese restaurant called Home Room in Oakland and UberEats showed one near us on the Peninsula. It was TERRIBLE. Microwaved mac and cheese sludge still frozen in the center. Nowhere in the ballpark as tasty as the one from the actual restaurant. Turns out a ghost kitchen opened 5 pseudo-locations all over the Bay Area but instead of the actual food from the restaurant it was SYSCO microwaved food. It was actually shocking to me how and why the original restaurant was willing to dilute their brand name with that sludge. Meanwhile that ghost kitchen location 6899 Mission Street in Daly City churns out a bunch of other brand name restaurant food that aren't actually located there. Googling the address in Daly City shows a "Local Food Hall" https://www.grubhub.com/restaurant/local-food-hall-daly-city-6899-mission-st-daly-city/1946637 https://www.grubhub.com/restaurant/local-food-hall-daly-city... Park Mediterranean, a Humphry Slocombe, a Subway and also Dosa all at the same address. And the "Local Food Hall" has locations with other restuarants cobbled together in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Milbrae and San Jose.
• cush 4y ago
  I ordered a David Chang burger from (what I didn't know was) a ghost kitchen. It took me 5 minutes wandering around an abandoned parking lot to realize the filthy trailer with no signage was where I was supposed to pick up my food. The trailer smelled like old fryer oil, and the guys working inside seemed... generally unaware... I took one bite and spat it out.
  • ragazzina 4y ago
    What is a "David Chang burger"? From the context it must not be the place you ordered it from, and I can't find a standard recipe on google.
• bhaskara2 4y ago
  Great find!
  • avg_dev 4y ago
    Agreed. I thought the article was really interesting. I don’t know much about how the author got their data, it seems like it’s a Kaggle dataset and I’m not familiar with how that was procured, but the analysis was really fascinating to me. So was the tweet by the person who asked Zomato about the repeated separate instances using the same FSSAI license, which I looked up and here is the link: https://mobile.twitter.com/ManjoBun/status/1533113310106660865 https://mobile.twitter.com/ManjoBun/status/15331133101066608... : definitely no public follow up by Zomato. The line chart was great as well showing the huge number of listings for that one kitchen. I don’t live in India and I wondered what FSSAI is, so I looked that up as well. It’s the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India: https://www.fssai.gov.in/ https://www.fssai.gov.in/ The author is performing a public service that I feel ought to be done by the authority in question in the first place. I hope the article gets lots of traction and serves as an example for food safety authorities worldwide to prevent this kind of trickery. I’m leaning towards subscribing to the author’s newsletter; at the end of the article they mention that they were the ones who posted that recent fake IMDB credit article which I also saw on HN, and I’m looking forward to reading the article on the early Indian internet (https://peabee.substack.com/p/15-mafatlal-and-the-early-indian https://peabee.substack.com/p/15-mafatlal-and-the-early-indi...). (I once had a chance to see Vint Cerf give a talk and while it was a while ago I remember enjoying it.) Last note: I thought it was kind of funny how the author resorted to using Google maps photos of the kitchens. I thought it would be worth an excursion outside to get more recent photos and see them first hand, but maybe the author has mobility issues or something. I feel it would add a personal touch though.
• discordance 4y ago
  Reminds me of those 1000 in 1 game cartridges. Duck hunt 49 was the best.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    The best were when there was one almost game and 999 tech demos that weren’t even a game. Now those 1000 game cartridges are all just MAME rips of commercial games.
• thewebcount 4y ago
  We have something similar here in the US. For certain types of services, every listing you find online (it used to be in the phone book in the olden days), is really the same generic service. In fact, the service you’re calling is some middleman who doesn’t actually perform the service, but instead contracts it out to someone local to you. They often live and operate elsewhere in the country. This is the case for flower delivery, and, I recently discovered, bee removal. I’m sure there are others. But in general if you go to a search engine and type “$service $location” (I.e. “bee removal Los Angeles”), you’ll get tons of these types of listings.
  • s0rce 4y ago
    Lots of long distance movers work like this, they are just some broker middle-man often based in Florida that just makes the process more complicated and worse.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Most long distance movers aren’t. There’s a local truck and guys who load it, and then everything is offloaded at some central depot and sent to another depot where it’s loaded on a different truck for final delivery. Door to door locked trailer is more expensive and harder to find unless you do something like pods.
      • Groxx 4y ago
        Where "local truck" is "a vehicle that can fit at the location, unlike a semi" and "depot" is "nearby, where their semi is parked", sure. And they do frequently hire local help, rather than cart them across hundreds or thousands of miles. But it's not like they're going to post office / Amazon / etc "hubs" and changing vehicles along the way - the human labor cost and increased risk would be far too high, though pods might be feasible. The same semi and the same driver does 99% of the distance, and often hires their own helpers. The local shuttling and helpers are entirely reasonable and often unavoidable.
        • 4y ago
• graedus 4y ago
  Related, from March 2021: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpgd7/the-mystery-of-fcking-good-pizza-travis-kalanick-cloudkitchens-future-foods-delivery-restaurants https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpgd7/the-mystery-of-fcking...
  • flycatcha 4y ago
    Wow. This is so eye opening.
  • thewebcount 4y ago
    Ugh. These Ghost Kitchen jerks have been spamming me for an interview. Not interested in ever working for any business associated with Travis Kalanik, thanks.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    Thank you so much for this link. Great article, quite appaling ao. It seems the Uber bros now brought the gig economy to the franchising industry... I hate the gig economy with a vengeance, it ia a lazy way for the rich to profit of the poor without taking any tangible risks whatsoever. Even better, you can ignore basically all regulations, those are for the poor peasants anyeay.
• solatic 4y ago
  I mean, why not? Companies like Unilever have been doing this for far longer than anyone in the restaurant space. Churn out thousands of brands that supposedly "compete" with each other in the marketplace. If one of those brands has a reputation problem, shut it down and replace it. Rinse and repeat. If the practice is distasteful, then change the law, but beware the lobbyists.
  • spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Its rampant across industries. Hotel chains have sub-brands, sometimes with suspiciously similar names. As far as industries go, the restaurant industry is probably one of the least consolidated in the world. For every chain restaurant, there are a dozen standalone restaurants.
    • bobthepanda 4y ago
      This is because, where regulations allow, people will literally set up a small restaurant with two plastic yard tables and a open top grill. In the US that type of setup is pretty much illegal everywhere. Chains were becoming more prevalent, but recently we’ve basically gone back to the same model with a food truck, which is tiny and takes up a parking spot. Usually taking off the wheels is illegal though.
      • bornfreddy 4y ago
        Cool, this is interesting... What makes the "two plastic yard tables and a open top grill" restaurant illegal? Sanitary requirements or some minimal size mandate? Otherwise I like the concept of food trucks, to me they are a perfect way for enthusiastic chefs to start their business with low(ish) money investment.
        • notsapiensatall 4y ago
          This sounds fun. Let's pick a state that is not known for onerous regulations...how about South Dakota? >Food employees must clean their hands in a handwashing lavatory and may not clean their hands in a sink used for food preparation or in a service sink or a curbed cleaning facility used for the disposal of mop water and similar liquid waste. >Food must be stored in a clean, dry location where it is not exposed to splash, dust, or other contamination and is at least 15 centimeters (6 inches) above the floor >Sufficient refrigeration facilities or other effectively insulated facilities that are conveniently located must be provided to assure the maintenance of potentially hazardous food at required temperatures during storage. Each mechanically refrigerated facility storing potentially hazardous food must be provided with a numerically scaled indicating thermometer, accurate to ±1°C (2°F), located to measure air temperature in the warmest part of the facility. >Fruits and vegetables may be washed by using chemicals as specified in 21 C.F.R. 173.315, April 1, 1996. Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak. >A ventilation hood system must be provided over all cooking equipment which produces steam, excessive smoke, grease vapors, or odors. >Perimeter walls and roof of a food establishment must effectively protect the establishment from the weather and the entry of insects, rodents, and other animals. It would be hard to meet those requirements with a grill and two tables, but the list goes on: https://sdlegislature.gov/Rules/Administrative/17361 https://sdlegislature.gov/Rules/Administrative/17361
• wmab 4y ago
  I'm sure it's against both's ToS but that doesn't really matter. The concern here is spamming on the third party ordering apps and clearly trying to appear as other legitimate brands. Hopefully the reviews shown in the app will detract people from ordering from them (if it were a popular restaurant then surely a low rating would be a red flag?). There are legitimate reasons for a cloud kitchen wishing to run multiple brands/food concepts that are fine and actually very entrepreneurial. For example, someone could wish to run multiple different food concepts (Chinese, Thai, Pizza, Mexican, etc.), each with limited menus and cross use a bulk of the ingredients, and instead of having one huge disjointed menu, you can more accurately cater and be found by hungry eaters who are looking for that specific cuisine. As long as you're providing quality food at good prices then you'll be competitive with other restaurants within your chosen cuisines and be able to cater to more of the demand-side of the marketplace.
• gumby 4y ago
  Why should Swiggy Zomato care? They get paid to deliver food. These shops give them more business with less effort for the delivery people. I was astonished that the first one seemed to actually have tables!
• jijji 4y ago
  What was funny to me was the name "Taste of China" and when you look at the menu, none of it refers to common chinese food. All of it refers to indian food.
  • contingencies 4y ago
    Traveling South India there are precisely three types of Indian food: veg, non-veg, and "Chinese".
• throwaway1851 4y ago
  A cardinal rule of choosing restaurants is to avoid the ones with huge, unfocused menus. The quality is uniformly terrible and the kitchens are often unsanitary. I imagine that running one of these in the dark is not going to improve on that baseline.
  • gernb 4y ago
    A agree with you but I'm not sure the general public does. For a long time The Cheesecake Factory was very popular and they arguably have a large unfocused menu. I'm not saying they're good but giving how popular they were lots of people thought they were good.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      There’s a specific class of “reheat Sysco” restaurants that are quite popular - Dennys, Applebees, etc. their menus are designed to have something for everyone and so are an acceptable middle ground when people don’t agree on where to go. Same reason you’ll find a burger at the local Chinese/Mexican place, so the kids will shut up (one fo the absolute best burgers I’ve ever had was from a small burrito shop so appearances can be deceiving).
  • gtyras2mrs 4y ago
    > A cardinal rule of choosing restaurants is to avoid the ones with huge, unfocused menus. Take Behrouz Biriyani and Faasos in India. These are operated by the same company - and almost always from the same location. However because they have 2 different listings and thus 2 separate menus, they are able to create a relatively cohesive and simple menu for each listing. So on first glance Behrouz Biriyani, looks fairly straightforward. It serves Biriyanis (with a lot of variants/sizes/combos etc). And Faasos serves wraps, rolls and other related snack foods. If you did not know that these were essentially from the same place, you would assume that these were separate restaurants with relatively focussed menu, hence passing said cardinal rule. With physical restaurants, the rule is easier to apply. With deliveries, it's far more difficult as the huge, unfocussed menus get separated into different restaurant listings.
• baby 4y ago
  Is this what will finally take down delivery? There’s also the “one restaurant, thousands of different kitchen” with mr beast opening beast burger locations all over the US thanks to ghost restaurants. It makes zero sense to me but again, I never order delivery because it’s cold, expensive, and less good.
  • bornfreddy 4y ago
    Sorry to be the one to tell you that, but food delivery is here to stay. It is convenient, and at the end of the day, convenience trumps everything. The lesser problems (food being cold, pricing, quality) are simply optimisations waiting to happen, and actually already happening. What OP describes is an anomaly that should be easy to fix by any platform, and if they are smart, they will fix it - or decay slowly (at least I hope this is what will happen, and that they take Amazon & Google Search with them too).
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      I think pricing might be biggest stumbling block and is probably the hardest to solve. Platforms want their oversized cuts, delivery is personal service so always have lower limit which is somewhat high. And restaurants themselves already have rather low margins. Quality is just natural progression. Good food survive and bad food keep being replaced with new restaurants. Just like traditional restaurant industry.
    • throwaway290 4y ago
      > Convenience trumps everything Quality food and drink are extremely sensitive to timing, as in minutes matter, and if you are talking about a developed country keep in mind that consumers are sophisticated and getting more so by year, they are aware about it and pay attention to it and this will be reflected in the market. If convenience really trumped everything we would all be eating dry instant noodle out of the packaging. Delivery may remain a thing in the suburbs but it would always be a second rate option.
      • bombcar 4y ago
• swivelmaster 4y ago
  Made the mistake of ordering Thai food from a ghost kitchen restaurant from Doordash in Redwood City (they have a kitchen here). It was the worst Thai food I have ever had by about ten miles. Like, I have never had Thai food that approached "okay" - it's always been at least "good." The rice was dry, felt like it had been out all day or maybe reheated from the fridge. The chicken was seasoned as if it had been intended for Mexican food (on its own, not bad, but didn't taste like Thai food at all). My pad thai tasted bland. How bad does a pad thai recipe need to be to taste BLAND? Unbelievable.
• forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Saw those cloud kitchens mentioned couple of days ago in another post on people "gaming" the system. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559519)
• ivraatiems 4y ago
  Has anyone had a good meal from a ghost kitchen-style restaurant? I've only ever heard awful things.
  • rawling 4y ago
    UK, ordered Mexican on Deliveroo from a new place, turned up. QR code on the bag led to a Linktree that just linked 3 delivery services. No other internet presence. Drove past the address from Deliveroo on my way home and it was a row of shopfronts with iirc a delivery pizza restaurant as the only food there. But the food was so good that my hosts have kept on ordering from there.
  • lozenge 4y ago
    In the UK, I've ordered from Deliveroo Editions, which is ghost kitchens with the branding and food of real restaurant chains. It's been OK, unsurprisingly a chain with 150 branches is just reheating something made in a factory, not tasting and adjusting. So by ordering from Deliveroo Editions you get the same thing. The UK does have the predatory type of ghost kitchen as well and I have never ordered from them. The incentives are skewed towards getting new customers, not repeat ones, and just ripping off as many as you can find.
  • avg_dev 4y ago
    > Look, I order food online a lot, maybe more than I should. And some cloud kitchens here are great, they deliver good food at decent prices. From the article
• achairapart 4y ago
  Related, this recent thread about Doordash/GrubHub was (in a way) kind of hilarious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339894
• rixrax 4y ago
  I was evaluating natural text to speech packages a year or so a go. And I was left with the eerie feeling that at least half of the offering must have been fronts for the same company/person, if not also exactly the same software. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sing-up and payment workflows of the various packages that followed exactly same pattern. So either in one corner of that market everyone copied each other there, or somebody just saturated that corner with their offerings.
  • avg_dev 4y ago
    I irks me that this is a method that is resorted to in any field. I don’t like it at all. It’s a dubious practice at best. I am sure it has some advantages to a profit seeking seller, but it’s ethically pretty shitty in my opinion.
• dotcoma 4y ago
  Buy prepared food online, and get delivered crap. What a surprise!
  • dotcoma 4y ago
    Even better: Zomato and similar companies are in it just for the money, as are those who operate “cloud kitchens” (sic), and so the result is crap food. Big surprise, right?
• christkv 4y ago
  One of the delivery companies here in Spain Globo goes the next step and runs virtual kitchens themselves with virtual brands. I now have to double check if it’s a real restaurant before ordering anything.
• foolfoolz 4y ago
  i feel like i’m the only one not on the food delivery bandwagon. i have ordered delivery food exactly 0 times in the last 5 years. probably even 10. i know i’m an outlier. no i won’t change
  • Cederfjard 4y ago
    Well, how come? I can imagine a couple of reasons but I’d be curious to hear yours. Personally I order too often, it’s just so convenient.
    • foolfoolz 4y ago
      i like to cook. i don’t see cooking as inconvenient as i cook a lot so i’m always stocked on things that are easy and taste great. id rather go pick it up because i think it’s faster and less likely to have been sitting out
• silisili 4y ago
  Ah, reminds me of a recent experience. Looking for a local, nonchain pizza place and came across a nice Italian sounding place, Pasqually's Pizza & Wings. Googled for more reviews, and found out it's just the fancy sounding name for the godawful Chuck E Cheese kitchen.
• noduerme 4y ago
  Man, India seems like the Wild West. I lived in Vietnam during a brief explosion of internet connectivity and online consumerism -- mild by comparison. This isn't the kind of "democracy" or freedom of speech we would like to export as a civilization. I feel like American consumer/industry has just opened the doors to every kind of scam possible in countries which were not prepared for it. And many of them rebel as if it were a conquest, but it's not. It's progress. It just becomes grotesque when it's left to places without law. Let me explain. There is an important turning point, I think, in every country where you develop antibodies against the worst kinds of scams. Scams we may have let loose. But by the 1920s, most Americans would not trust a witch doctor (even if they would have trusted him in 1890). In the case of Russia, their leadership longs for 1890; they reject western modernity altogether and want to reenact a medieval war. For China it's more like: let's take the methods and eject the "false" morals. What they don't realize is that our (possibly stupid) individual morals are the only thing that hold the fruitful methods of capitalism in check for us, in our country. Our so-called morals are not for others; they are the way to restrain ourselves. To be more specific, Russia has a morality misaligned with successful capitalism - they think rejection and revanchism are the key to prosperity; China has a morality too aligned with it - they do not see that individual freedoms and happiness are crucial; and America has forgotten its meaning altogether, because it no longer cares about individuals or the group, only identity-disordered affinity groups. So tl;dr capitalism is a big tree that will uproot your house, or it can be tamed into a small tree that provides shade and sustenance; or it can be chopped down leaving you with nothing. The progression of 19th century societies who had no prior history to work from was to go through those three phases and return to a median. The progression of societies just encountering the full brutal force of lying, mercenary, vicious capitalism for the first time will probably be the same trajectory... but it would be helpful if they learned from our mistakes and (legally) stopped these things. The legal system is the best brake on abuses of capitalism; it's the natural counterpart that evolves over the years. If you want to fix this problem, fix the legal system. I'm from a history of Jews who were all lawyers. Not allowed into universities. Not allowed to partake in the mainstream civilization of Germany or Russia or Ukraine or America... but versed in their laws and the contradictions inherent in their laws. You find this shit, this data that shows horrible mismanagement and crime in your country? Learn the laws better than the ones who wrote them know them. Then, sue the motherfuckers under their own laws. That's how you get a civilized country.
• rocqua 4y ago
  Could this be money laundering? By running 180 separate 'companies' you split any large amounts 180 ways. Anyone who checks if they can order sees that, indeed, each of these businesses is 'real'. Normal money laundering with cash businesses has the problem that each bit of storefront can only plausibly earn so much money. This seems like a pretty nice way to get around this limit.
  • 867-5309 4y ago
    in most countries in Europe companies have to publish their accounts publicly. if the same or similar rule exists in India, or if the same or similar scam exists in Europe, company names and revenue could be matched with the food delivery dataset
    • Havoc 4y ago
      >in most countries in Europe companies have to publish their accounts publicly. i Not sure about rest, but UK side these accounts can be in abbreviated form...to the point where you can't really see anything meaningful
      • dazc 4y ago
        True, abbreviated accounts are basically you're cash/assets position on one day of the year.
  • webmobdev 4y ago
    No, this is not money laundering (it would be a poor one as this will immediately arouse suspicion on such platforms - after all, if you place an order, the delivery person will appear to your kitchen to collect the order and if there is no food they will report you. For this to be successful both Swiggy and Zomato itself need to be involved in it. And as the author noted, food is available from these restaurants, even if it is lousy food.) What the author doesn't realise is that cloud kitchens are a part of the business model of both Swiggy and Zomato. In fact they have many "cloud kitchens" that are run by them. Another business model they have is to identify successful restaurants with huge demand, and contract with them to open a kitchen-only restaurant in another area (they make more profit when deliveries are short distant; so if a far-away restaurant has a lot of demand from a distant area most people don't order because of the higher delivery charges which means disgruntled customers who crib about the high charges). My friend is a chef and he explored the option of tying with them, but dropped the plan as he didn't want a kitchen-only restaurant. I learnt about the contract model when I called up my 2 of my favourite restaurants to complain about the drastic drop in quality of their food - they then told me that was because it was a Swiggy cloud-only kitchen with a new cook nearer to where I live. Like the author, I too was pissed that Swiggy hadn't properly informed me (through their listing) that this was not the restaurant from which I regularly ordered. One of these cloud-kitchen shut down because the original restaurant began to get bad reviews. I believe it was after these kind of issues, that Swiggy and Zomato allowed restaurants to use a different brand for cloud kitchens. And now, it appears, they also allow multiple listings by same restaurants / kitchen-only places too. I now follow the simple rule of only ordering from dine-in restaurants that I have had food from. Or from old and reputed brands of restaurants in my area.
• cgcg 4y ago
• cgcg 4y ago
• euroderf 4y ago
  A textbook case of "brand proliferation".
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Just make it one restaurant with a wide healthy menu, a decent app and a social conscious co-op feel rather than a predatory vibe and you could clean up without all the BS.
  • speedgoose 4y ago
    A wide menu is usually a red flag. It can be microwaved frozen food, but it's also difficult to master many recipes.
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      This feels like going to a butcher and a baker rather than a supermarket. At some point the economics win.
      • speedgoose 4y ago
        Mediocre restaurants are very forgettable experiences. You may value running a good restaurant higher than optimising profits.
• jiggywiggy 4y ago
  So much work to sell shitty food, if they would have put half that energy & creativity into making their food better they would have had an amazing restaurant.
• VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I don't like the idea, mostly because it means there is a much greater chance of a restaurant where I enjoy something being churned out rather than any puritanical argument that restaurants have to exist in a particular form. I remember back when I was at university we had a friend who worked for a rather successful artisanal coffee shop. The owner then opened up 2-3 other coffee places under completely different names around the city. I wonder how many people actually knew that their little coffee shop was part of a mini empire. It's not nearly as bad as large breweries trying to muscle in on the microbrewery scene with a subbrand. That genuinely gets my blood pressure up.
• xg15 4y ago
  Looking forward to the next iteration of this: Decentralised cloud kitchens. Do you have a freezer and a microwave? Then you, too can become a restaurant owner - just download our app and register! Once you signed up, we'll send you a week's supply of frozen meals from our selection. You can accept orders from our app, simply reheat one item, repackage it, wait for our delivery specialist to arrive and you're good to go! For a modest 30% fee we'll take care of all the rest!
  • kilroy123 4y ago
    I could honestly see this happening. Time to start cooking more.
  • nine_k 4y ago
    McDonald's restaurants work using a similar, though not as simplistic, model, and are a huge success worldwide.
    • xg15 4y ago
      Of course at that point as an end user, you could just "eliminate the middleman", and go to the next supermarket and buy yourself a bunch of microwave food. The whole model only works because the end users don't know they are ordering reheated microwave crap. It's deception, nothing else. McDonald's and other franchisers at least still offer a physical restaurant and food items you wouldn't be able to prepare at home in that quality.
      • xxs 4y ago
        >McDonald's and other franchisers ... you wouldn't be able to prepare at home in that quality. What do you mean - McDonalds is piss poor quality fast food. It's ok at best but nowhere near close home cooked meal. Even 20min cooking w/o a microwave oven should produce decent results.
        • longtimelistnr 4y ago
          No shot you can recreate anything close to McDonald’s fries without a fryer and that alone is worth it. Even say fries and a milkshake. No premade milkshake and fries will touch a real fryer and ice cream machine
• mytailorisrich 4y ago
  What matters is the food. For instance, where I live (England, so granted not a gastronomical paradise) the best pizzas in town are from a chain that is only available through the local Deliveroo's dark kitchen. This absolutely does not matter to me. What does is the product I get.
• lysp 4y ago
  I noticed this with a local restaurant, but didn't actually mind. The main restaurant was a pizza/pasta/burger restaurant. They also had a sub-brand named "burger xyz" or something similar, and only sold burgers. Same phone number. I compared prices and the burgers were all named the same, but more expensive in their standalone brand. I guess it was targeting people ordering a specific type of food.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Exactly. You don’t search “pizza” when you want “burger” and charging a bit more actually works out to a discount to the cognizendi.
• john_minsk 4y ago
  Did he order from these places? The article is incomplete without it. May be the food is good…
• togaen 4y ago
  who cares… if you’re so worried about where your food comes from, don’t order it from the internet. go get it in person.
• z9znz 4y ago
  This low-quality shotgun approach (that these kitchens are using) remind me of the recruiting and offshoring plagues of the early 2000s. Recruiters were onced skilled professionals, but they got replaced by people who spoke almost unrecognizable English and who basically spammed all day to find talent. They didn't even read resumes, so you would get calls (and later emails) for crap that was nowhere on your resume. This basically ruined what was once a very effective way of finding jobs and gigs. It took over a decade for this garbage approach to fade and real recruiters to reappear. The companies hated it too, because they would get innundated with every resume one of these brainless recruiters would send. Companies couldn't find real talent due to the piles of unqualified candidates. That's not to say the candidates were bad, but they were not qualified for the particular skills the client needed. Then the offshoring craze developed, and suddenly skilled developers were laid off en masse, with the more senior developers actually being tasked with training their offshored replacements. Predictably, most of the replacements were people with some basic training and absolutely no ability to think for themselves. The end result was about two decades of stalled progress in corporate software development and artificially depressed wages. This restaurant scenario seems to be just another variation. One must wonder if this is a cultural thing. It seems obviously doomed to eventual failure, and like the other situations I described it will bring the actual good services down with it.
  • civilized 4y ago
    > The end result was about two decades of stalled progress in corporate software development and artificially depressed wages. As a younger guy, I've always wondered why there are so many "fossil" legacy critical applications at my company. They can only run on a VM and appear unaltered from their last version in the late 90s / early 2000s. Pretty sure some of them can only run on IE6.
    • blantonl 4y ago
      ActiveX was one of the greatest stains on the Web to ever exist.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    I wonder if something along those lines would work in the traditional job search: Generate tens of thousands of brand identities (random name + random e-mail address) and mail-merge them onto basically the same resume, maybe with some minor wording perturbations. Flood companies with these resumes and then sit back and wait for one of your brands to slip through their hiring algorithms, and you got the interview. If you eventually get the job and they ask about the name, just say it was an old alias, and you'd prefer to go by [your real] name.
• deanc 4y ago
  We have a few shitty ones of these, mostly doing pizzas, burgers etc. nearby. But there is one business [1] that's popped up which is a cloud kitchen by definition, but they bring in chefs, partner with established restaurants and teach them their signature dishes, and open satellite kitchens on food delivery services as a hub in particular neighbourhoods. It's a win for everyone. The restaurants get to expand their brand to neighbourhoods without opening a physical location, the neighbourhoods get some good food in their hoods without having to live in the city, and you can also order a couple of things from entirely different restaurants on the same order, saving delivery. [1] https://www.huuva.io/ https://www.huuva.io/
• civilized 4y ago
  Reminds me of how everything on Amazon is sold by a "brand" called something like XOUQND these days.
• navigate8310 4y ago
  Believe me or not, this is an amazing way to launder money.
  • cmukka 4y ago
    I am not sure I follow. How would that be possible?
• teknopaul 4y ago
  Not heard Swiggy and Zomato but I guess the moral of the story is don't trust them and don't give them your business. Just like your don't trust Amazon or Alibabab or any of these other shop aggregators that do not really care what goes on under their name. Find a good restaurant and call direct. Perhaps make some friends that do deliveries, so you can trust them too. The free market only really works when their is sufficient competition, rational consumers should avoid big players, if at all possible, because it is never in your interest. If you are forced to purchase from them take it up with the government that is meant to be keeping the market free.
• chasing 4y ago
  I just can't believe that aggregator sites would be gamed by bad actors... Shocked, I tell you. Also, on all of these delivery services I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option. I want to support local businesses — actual restaurants. It's annoying having to research any new place I want to try to make sure it's not operated out of the back side of some warehouse. (Also: "Curate," don't aggregate. It's a little more expensive and requires actual knowledge, which is why no one wants to do it. But then you actually become a service people can trust.)
  • danielvaughn 4y ago
    Guy Fieri opened up a pop-up restaurant in my town, only available via Grubhub or Seamless or whatever, and my family wanted to try it out. I'm not a Guy Fieri fan so I wasn't expecting much, but at the very least I was expecting moderately good food. What we got was something you would see at a high school cafeteria, and I'm not exaggerating. It was nearly inedible, so bad that some members of my family felt compelled to write a letter to Guy Fieri's company.
    • perfectlyfriedb 4y ago
      This has been my experience with every cloud kitchen "brand" I've dared to try (because it was late and they're usually the only ones still open.) I think fundamentally the concept just doesn't attract the right kind of business owners. To open a restaurant of your own you must, on some level I assume, be interested in cooking or cuisine. Cloud kitchens as a concept seemed like they were marketed more to investor/vc types as a vertical to invest in. Typically this group would have gravitated towards franchise ownership where some other corporate entity has figure out the "food" part of the equation. It may not be the most healthy or even the best but they take care of making something palatable and most importantly consistent.
    • tacostakohashi 4y ago
      > Guy Fieri opened up a pop-up restaurant in my town Translation: Some anonymous people that know more about spreadsheets than cooking decided to open a business in my town. They realized that making decent food is a slow and expensive way to build a brand recognition, so they entered into a licensing agreement with Guy Fieri instead.
• am_lu 4y ago
  I been for a while on technical side of one of delivery company. Fixing electric mopeds for them. Its a BIG business and it does not really matter if makes money, its the investors corporate funds getting pumped into the food delivery industry.
• thepasswordis 4y ago
  I want more costcos. To people who don't know, part of the core of Costco's business model is curation, which leads to customer trust. I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. I know that anything with a kirkland brand on it is going to be so high quality and so cheap that it feels like I found a cheat. What's funny about costco is that their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence. Yeah they have a website, but it doesn't seem to actually have a comprehensive list of everything they sell. You have to go to the store and check out what they have (and get a hot dog or a piece of pizza while you're there) If there was a delivery app that curated restaurants, I would absolutely love it, and I also think it would be really successful.
  • cma 4y ago
    > I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. Costco online is a different story though. They sell stuff like laser hair regrowth helmets and magnetic healing pads.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Even in store, they sell “medical” turmeric 100ft away at 1,000x the price of turmeric in the spice aisle.
  • jmacd 4y ago
    I think that they don't show store inventory purposely. They still want you going in to the store and doing your Full Big Shop™ The Costco Grocery component of their website is actually pretty impressive. Quick shipping times and decent prices. Ordering non-grocery from the website still has a long lead time before the item actually ships.
    • ok123456 4y ago
      This is good. I don't want some Gary V disciple deciding to do "retail arbitrage" full time---buying all the relatively cheaper products to sell on line.
• ta988 4y ago
  So many restaurants like that where I live. they serve low quality food (ingredients, recipes, cooking, presentation), then change names regularly. This is even worse than the more traditional fastfoods where at least you know that what you get will more or less stay the same over the months.
• tardismechanic 4y ago
  I am aware of a cloud kitchen near where I live in Pune offering 9 brands - and I found it not bad actually. At least as of now... https://eatclub.in/ https://eatclub.in/
• trynewideas 4y ago
  Reminder every time I see a ghost kitchens story that one of the bigger players in the space, REEF, uses ghost kitchens to harvest data for real estate and came into the angle as a parking vendor that needed to make money from lots that went vacant during the COVID-19 pandemic, and harvested data from parking customers to re-sell as highly geo-specific market and demographic trends. They've fully pivoted to becoming a property management type that will take your unused property and stuff it full of ghost kitchens, still harvesting data from those transactions to re-sell as market/demographic data. Their next play looks like they're extending the ghost kitchen model to retail storefronts, so get ready to be flooded with non-existent shops that sell drop-shipped garbage using rapid delivery.
• DoreenMichele 4y ago
  Not what I was expecting to read by any stretch of the imagination. I was looking forward to seeing some piece about how restaurants have evolved to virtual spaces and delivery first thanks to the pandemic or some such. I'm sure creative business types hate it when geeks who know how to search stuff profile their weird little approaches to trying to survive in today's economy and act like they clearly must be up to no good simply for having a large number of x, having no real evidence that the food is particularly bad or something.
• xtiansimon 4y ago
  Ha! And down in the village there are multiple restaurants, and each buys their goods from the same suppliers! Prepared by each restaurant you have Mexican, Peruvian, Chinese, Soul Food—but it’s all chicken from Restaurant Depot.
• missingcolours 4y ago
  I imagine the quality is pretty low with the number of menu items that single batch of cooks is trying to make. When you read about struggling restaurants trying to make a comeback, a common theme is an attempt at simplifying the menu so that they can focus on a core set of high quality dishes, as their menu had gotten bloated and thus the average quality of a dish inevitably declined.