Farm to Table? More Like Ghost Kitchen to Sofa
27th December 2019
The means is a type of business called a ghost kitchen. These are food establishments, usually fast-casual, that make meals that can be purchased exclusively with a delivery app like Seamless, Grubhub, DoorDash or Uber Eats. Ghost kitchens can house extensions of existing restaurants or new brands.
But customers cannot order takeout, and they cannot eat in a restaurant attached to the kitchen.
The moneymaking part is in the bundling: Several ghost kitchens can exist within the same physical kitchen, sharing ingredients and equipment and cooking staff used to supply multiple restaurant brands. (In practice, this means that a customer can order Indian food, burgers or falafel, all from different restaurants, but the food is all coming from the same address.)
The advantage huge urban areas like New York has, and the reason why a lot of people like living in places like New York (even with all of its disadvantages) is that it is a HUBE market that can support even the tiniest slivers of a niche interest — no matter how bizarre your wants and tastes may be, there are probably enough similar people in NYC to support a business catering to people like you.