Here’s some ghost kitchen new math for you: 800 degrees + 1 Reef = 500 ghost kitchens.
That’s at least according to Restaurant Business News, which is reporting the two companies have teamed up with plans to open 500 ghost kitchens. That’s a massive ghost kitchen land grab, of course, the kind that sounds good in a press release but will take huge amounts of capital to deploy.
Not that Reef has had problems raising capital. Last year, the company announced an eye-popping $700 million raise, in which it said it had plans to grow its ghost kitchen network. Still, a 500 ghost kitchens build-out for one restaurant chain will take hundreds of millions in capex, especially since the Reef model is to build dedicated kitchens to power new virtual restaurants. This model contrasts with the Virtual Dining Concepts or NextBite’s operating model which utilizes excess kitchen capacity in small restaurants or even chains to deploy new virtual brands.
Early Reef buildouts were in the company’s parking lots (Reef’s original business), but recently the company has gotten more creative, adding new kitchens in warehouses, retail stores and shipping containers.
The news isn’t 800 Degrees only push into the pizza business future. The company announced recently it’s teaming up with Piestro to deploy up to 3,600 automated pizza kiosks. All it has to do now is combine the robots with the dark kitchens a la PizzaHQ to create a fully robotic pizza chain.
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