What is the Difference Between Cloud Kitchen and Dining Restaurants?

Learn about what sets apart cloud kitchens from dining restaurants - from cost investment & brand presence to industry trends & resources.

What is the Difference Between Cloud Kitchen and Dining Restaurants?

A kitchen in the cloud or a virtual kitchen is only for home deliveries. They thrive on online ordering through different food delivery websites and don't have a physical restaurant. Unlike cloud kitchens, dining restaurants are traditional establishments that have their own distinctive brand. Basically, delivery kitchens and cloud kitchens are the same thing, the only difference is that the number of brands that prepare food in the same kitchen varies. In addition, a ghost kitchen has a centralized kitchen, but it exists practically throughout the region to reach a wider range of customers.

They don't have a physical presence where people can have dinner and enjoy the environment. Customers place their orders through an online platform, either the website or a delivery platform. They can choose to pick it up themselves or send it to their doorstep. The second factor that differentiates the two is the cost of the investment. The investment needed for the kitchen in the cloud is much lower compared to the restaurant for dinner.

The restaurant for dinner requires a good interior, a good arrangement of furniture, a kitchen configuration, a waiting room for customers, a lighting configuration, service staff and a fairly large space that includes eating, cleaning and sanitary facilities. Whereas the cloud kitchen can be installed anywhere, as it requires only the space for cooking and a minimum amount of lighting and other configuration. The cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen was born out of the need to facilitate and simplify food delivery solutions. Looking ahead, advances in kitchen automation, drone delivery and the continuous growth of the collaborative economy seek to give cloud kitchens a greater advantage by further reducing their costs. Now that you understand the difference between a delivery kitchen, in the cloud and a ghost kitchen, it's quite simple to understand the business model of a kitchen in the cloud. Well, ghost kitchens are basically restaurants that are very much alive in online delivery apps, but that don't physically exist. Whether you're thinking of opening a virtual restaurant or opening a kitchen in a grocery store, we've outlined all the steps to get you started in this blog, along with lots of industry resources and free ads on The Kitchen Door to connect food companies with commercial kitchen space for rent.

All you need is to hire kitchen staff and cleaning staff to clean the kitchen and containers. This means that there is a central kitchen where food is prepared and delivered to the auxiliary kitchen. When a customer places an order, they are redirected to the nearest virtual kitchen, from where the prepared food is delivered to the central kitchen. By using custom spaces and optimizing their processes specifically for delivery, ghost kitchens can operate very efficiently. Virtual Kitchen Co., which already operates several home-delivery-only kitchens in San Francisco, plans to open a dozen more in the Bay Area in the next six months. When you hire resources for a restaurant, you need to hire different staff for different requirements, including kitchen staff for kitchen needs, service staff for service requirements, security personnel for site safety, cleaning staff for disinfection and cleaning of property, gardener if your location includes garden for children's play area, electrician and plumber full time in case of emergency, utility staff for clean kitchen and utensils etc.

But the difference between delivery kitchens is that Cloud Kitchen has numerous brands that operate at same point of sale. Backed by Google and experienced founders, Kitchen United is another big name to consider in world of cloud cooking. Finally we will analyze industry trends around shared kitchens and what future of this new era of food delivery will be like before pointing out more resources for those who want to establish their own kitchen business in cloud. There are different approaches to managing a kitchen in cloud ranging from adding opportunistic brand that only delivers to kitchen of existing restaurant to managing police station kitchen specially designed to house several brands. Theoretically ghost kitchens incur lower costs by eliminating need to operate in front of house have space on floor to sit or high rents for storefronts with lot of foot traffic in prime locations.

Liz Stower
Liz Stower

Amateur zombie fanatic. Award-winning coffee ninja. Unapologetic food nerd. Wannabe tv lover. Wannabe zombie fan.