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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 whic

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.

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.