Expanding menu offerings to include items designed for delivery is a great way for restaurants to optimize their menu offerings. In the strictest sense of the term, a ghost kitchen is an off-premises facility for preparing food for delivery. Sometimes called a virtual restaurant, virtual kitchen, or cloud kitchen, a ghost kitchen is a food service company that serves customers exclusively through online orders. Let's find out how adopting the ghost kitchen concept can generate the desired growth and make your established restaurant thrive.
One of the advantages of ghost kitchens is the ability to experiment with new menu items or concepts, since you can control the menu available live, so adding a special menu at noon or eliminating an item due to lack of ingredients isn't that harmful. If you offer third-party delivery to both your physical location and your ghost kitchen, you should treat your ghost kitchen as a separate location and create a separate AR account for each third-party delivery service. Ghost kitchens can be used to launch a new restaurant brand or as a means for existing restaurant brands to expand their delivery range. Ghost kitchens allow you to design new gastronomic concepts, try different recipes and discover what works for you at a fraction of the cost, time and risks involved in conventional restaurants.
If it's not possible to accommodate the kitchen in your current restaurant for a ghost kitchen or a virtual kitchen, you can rent a place in the kitchen from a grocery store owner. Ghost kitchens are popular because they're easier to open, operate and make a profit than a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant that requires restaurant space to accommodate diner traffic. After all, ghost kitchens are already a multi-billion dollar industry and experts estimate expansive growth over the next decade. Ghost kitchens reduced the cost of real estate and labor by reducing the restaurant model to accommodate off-site food sales. As a ghost kitchen operator, it can be difficult to own a restaurant, since it's a hypercompetitive space.
For entrepreneurs, ghost kitchens offer the opportunity to experiment and launch their restaurant brands at a minimum cost and with less risk than opening a physical store. If you decide to launch a ghost kitchen for your current restaurant business, these tips will help you establish and run your new commercial company. Similar to delivery at a traditional restaurant, customers contact the ghost kitchen through the restaurant's website or mobile app or through a third-party delivery application. As with scheduling a physical branch, you'll need to schedule Ghost Kitchen employees well in advance, create a process and deadline for accepting employee scheduling requests, and try to give your employees two consecutive days off per week. For restaurants that have already established physical locations, ghost kitchens can be a way to adapt to changing trends, create a new source of income and expand the range of delivery. Help guide your customers through a complete dining experience by offering specific item combinations that include appetizers, main courses and desserts to provide a full meal from your ghost kitchen.
You can even offer discounts to persuade your customers to maximize their orders.
