Are you thinking of launching a ghost kitchen? Get our free definitive guide to starting a successful ghost kitchen. It's a 7000-word guide that covers everything related to operations, technology, marketing and more. As the industry faces historic change, Restaurant365 allows owners and operators to meet the needs of their equipment and pay faster than ever. Restaurant365 bridges the gap between accounting and operations by centralizing all data, helping restaurant operators to be more efficient, to forecast accurately, and to address any challenge or opportunity with speed and precision.
Whether you like to watch, read or connect, Restaurant365 has a growing menu of information to keep you updated on restaurant news and best practices. Requests for shelter in place, restrictions on eating on site and doubts from diners when it comes to eating out have combined to cause restaurants to shift their focus to takeout and home delivery. The increase in demand for food delivery had already boosted the growth of ghost kitchens, and the COVID-19 pandemic has increased both the popularity and profitability of the model. Ghost kitchens reduce the cost of real estate and labor by reducing the restaurant model to adapt to off-site food sales.
The boom in ghost kitchens is expected to extend beyond COVID-19, according to Technomic, a strategic research consulting group for the restaurant industry, which expects food sales in ghost kitchens to increase by 25% every year for the next 5 years. Existing restaurants are creating their own virtual kitchens off-site, sometimes delivering food themselves to reduce the costs of third-party delivery services, while others are adopting third-party delivery to increase their visibility. And other restaurant brands rent kitchen space and labor from existing traditional restaurants to expand their delivery range. Wow Bao, a customer of Restaurant365, recently announced that it has partnered with operators in several cities to offer alternative sources of income by using its space, equipment and staff to serve basic foods prepared from Wow Bao, while external delivery providers offer meal delivery to customers.
One of the possible negative considerations includes the difficulties of ensuring that the food delivered at home offers the same quality as in your restaurant. You'll need to pack your meals for delivery, including packing the sauces on the side and making sure the containers are insulated. You'll also have to manage your online reputation even more diligently, since your delivery business exists exclusively online. In addition, if you use third-party delivery apps, your customer service is based on the customer's experience with the delivery service.
A bad experience can cause your restaurant to lose a customer forever. Another disadvantage is the shipping cost. Third-party apps can keep 30% of your delivery revenues, and internal delivery has its own costs, such as salaries, vehicle maintenance, gas and insurance. As if restaurant staff weren't already one of its biggest challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken it to critical levels.
Many employees don't feel safe returning to their jobs in restaurants because they don't feel safe. For more marketing ideas, read the blog post, 13 restaurant marketing ideas and tips to attract more customers. In its first month of operation, the ghost kitchen has been successful, according to the executive director of Great NH Restaurants, Tom Boucher. With a very low rent and no reception staff (waiters, hosts, manager) who helped recover sales.
We will expand and promote in our restaurants, where guests can order and pick up directly at the restaurant on a specific day of the week. This way, we'll reach 10 times more potential customers,” said Boucher. If you want to easily track data and gain insights into your operations, consider a comprehensive management solution specifically for restaurants. Restaurant365 incorporates restaurant accounting software and restaurant operations software into an all-in-one cloud-based platform.
Includes tools for financial reporting, operational reports, inventory control, scheduling and more. To learn more, schedule a free demo. As their stores remained inactive, they became virtual and built a ghost kitchen that served hamburgers and beers. In the strictest sense of the term, a ghost kitchen is an off-premises facility for preparing food for delivery.
This type of ghost kitchen owns the equipment and hires kitchen staff to produce food for one or more third-party brands. Shopping malls are ideal places to set up a ghost kitchen because they're located in high-traffic areas, making them a convenient place to pick up and deliver. Sometimes called a virtual restaurant, virtual kitchen, or cloud kitchen, a ghost kitchen is a food service business that serves customers exclusively through online orders. A ghost kitchen is a kitchen or “restaurant” that offers meals to consumers only at home.
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. One of the main advantages of a ghost kitchen business model is the limited staffing requirements, which can help reduce overhead and achieve greater profits. 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. The Ghost Kitchen has a variety of products related to popular brands (such as T-BONES chicken pie), as well as some takeout dinner options that just need to be reheated.
There is no fixed price for a ghost kitchen, since the cost will largely depend on whether you are going to use a police station kitchen or rent a commercial space. Faster launch: You can skip the design and construction of a new building, the permits and zoning, the complicated renovations and decoration, and turn what could be six months or a year of your life into just one month with a ghost kitchen. Study the trend of your takeaway food and home delivery business over the past few months and use those numbers for your initial ghost kitchen forecast. .
