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Cloud Kitchens

July 6, 2021

C3 Raises $80M to Expand Its Virtual Food Hall Concept

Virtual restaurant company C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) has raised an $80 million Series B funding round co-led by Brookfield Asset Management and REEF Technology. Egon Durban and Greg Mondre Managing Partners and Co-CEOs of Silver Lake Partners, along with Dean Adler, Co-Founder of real estate investment firm Lubert-Adler.

C3’s business these days is as much about real estate as it is about restaurants. The company operates more than 40 virtual restaurant brands, leveraging underutilized kitchen spaces around the country to cook and fulfill those orders. For example, the company has a partnership with Graduate Hotels and uses kitchen spaces at Graduate locations to serve delivery-only orders to guests and the surrounding community.

In March of this year, C3 said it would also bring its virtual restaurant concept to residential spaces, starting in Nashville, Tennessee and Phoenix, Arizona. The company recently partnered with Kitopi to take C3 brands overseas to the UAE, has a deal to use Reef locations for kitchens, and last month said it would make its virtual brands available to Chowly’s 10,000-plus restaurant customers.

For all C3 concepts and partnerships, meals are available through the company’s CITIZENS GO mobile app, which is powered on the back end by online order company Lunchbox’s software.  

The $80 million fundraise will go towards further expansion in the form of signing leases with real estate developers at various mixed-use, retail, and hospitality spaces. According to today’s press release, these leases will serve to open CITIZENS food halls, which are brick-and-mortar versions of the C3’s virtual food halls. These spaces will also provide additional kitchen space with which to fulfill delivery-only orders for C3 brands. 

The virtual food hall concept itself isn’t new, with companies like Deliveroo, Zuul, and others employing their own versions of it. Few have pursued expansion as aggressively as C3, however. The latter says it has opened 250+ digital brand locations in the U.S., will have 1,000 by year’s end and is on track for 12,000 kitchens globally by 2023. 

July 4, 2021

Voice bots and Back Office Tasks: A Mid-year Look at Restaurant Tech

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

As we’re fond of saying lately, last year’s pandemic-induced chaos accelerated the restaurant industry’s adoption of technology so much that about a decade’s worth of changes happened in the span of a couple months. Investor, restaurant tech guru, and friend of The Spoon Brita Rosenheim highlighted that point recently when she released her 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem Map. 

The map, while not exhaustive, includes a staggering number of companies across many areas of the restaurant business, from ordering and delivery tech to back-office tools, business intelligence, corporate catering and ghost kitchens. Even a casual glance shows just how enormous (or bloated, depending on your point of view) the restaurant tech sector has gotten over the last 18 months. 

Brita has her own takeaways and predictions bundled with her map, and you should definitely read through them if you are interested in learning more about restaurant tech’s near-term trajectory. Here, I’ll add a few of my own thoughts to the mix, including:

Rise of the voice bot. This is one category that’s slowly but steadily grown a presence in the restaurant industry over the last few years. But excepting maybe Domino’s chatbot, widespread voice-tech implementations at restaurants are still rare, though that will likely change in the next couple of years. McDonald’s threw heat on this topic last month by announcing it is currently testing automated ordering via voice tech at 10 locations, and that it expects this technology to be in all of its locations within the next five years. Meanwhile, the current labor shortage has left restaurants scrambling to make their operations more efficient. If correctly executed, going fully autonomous with the order process could shave seconds off every individual customers’ order. And those seconds (and costs) add up fast. 

The analytics opportunity. Marketing analytics for restaurants are another “it” category at the moment, if its slice of the restaurant tech pie above is any indication. In the words of Adam Brotman, CEO of Brightloom, online ordering tech has become “a commodity,” and that the next big frontier for restaurant tech is around analytics. When Brotman and I spoke a few months back, he explained that data — about customer preferences, transactions, order histories, etc. — is a huge opportunity for restaurants if they can figure out how to harness it. Seeing as that’s no small feat technically, a huge number of analytics and CRM companies have cropped up offering solutions to smaller businesses that can’t build these programs in-house. Expect more companies and much consolidation in this category.

Back-office bonanza. The sizable slice back-office tech gets in Brita’s market map reflects a trend we’ve written about before: that investment and interest in back-office tasks will continue to attract attention in the coming months. The back office was probably once the most “un-sexy” area of restaurant tech, since most of it has to do with digitizing invoices and schedules and helping businesses run payroll. One pandemic later, restaurants are trying to save on costs in as many areas as possible, and a surprisingly effective way to do that is through digitizing, centralizing, and streamlining some of these previously boring tasks. Like analytics, this category will see a wave of consolidation in the future, and in fact that is already happening.

As always, I welcome your thoughts on my thoughts, now and in the coming months as restaurant tech continues to evolve.

More Headlines

Local Kitchens Raises $25M for Its Virtual Food Hall Network – The ghost kitchen/virtual food hall, started by three ex-Doordash employees, has raised Series A funding roughly one year after launching.

Mobility Service Helbiz Opens Its First Ghost Kitchen – Italian-American mobility company Helbiz announced today it is launching its own ghost kitchen/food delivery/virtual restaurant business called Helbiz Kitchens.

Miso and Lancer Worldwide Aim to Automate Beverage Dispensing for QSRs – Miso announced a partnership with Lancer Worldwide, a global manufacturer of beverage dispensers, to develop an automated, intelligent system designed to speed up and organize drink orders.

June 29, 2021

Local Kitchens Raises $25M for Its Virtual Food Hall Network

Virtual food hall Local Kitchens has raised $25 million in Series A funding roughly one year after launching. The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from existing investors Human Capital and Pear VC. New investors Fifth Wall and Penny Jar Capital also participated. Local Kitchens says this round brings its total funding to $28 million. 

The San Francisco Bay Area-based company was founded by three ex-DoorDash employees in the summer of 2020. There are currently four Local Kitchens locations, all of which are in California: Cupertino, Menlo Park, San Jose, and Lafayette. 

These facilities function as combination ghost kitchen/virtual food halls. Orders from all participating restaurant concepts are cooked under one roof, while customers can order via the Local Kitchens website or onsite at a self-service kiosk. 

One notable feature of Local Kitchens is its ability to offer customers mix-and-match functionality when ordering digitally. In other words, customers can order from multiple different restaurant concepts and bundle them into a single transaction, rather than having to create a separate transaction for each restaurant. Kitchen United uses a similar approach for its ghost kitchens, as does Crave Collective, C3, and the newly opened Helbiz Kitchens.

“Bundling” virtual restaurant concepts together is one of those technological functions that looks simple on the surface but is rather a complicated execution on the back end. Speaking recently with The Spoon, Kitchen United’s Atul Sood explained that this idea is time consuming and expensive from a development perspective, and suggested that we may see more third-party restaurant tech in the future that helps ghost kitchen facilities integrate this feature. 

For Local Kitchens right now, customers can only order meals for pickup, though the company says delivery is “coming soon.” It is yet unclear who will delivery the food: a third-party service like DoorDash or an in-house operation. Up to now, the default delivery method has been third-party services. Lately, though, more ghost kitchen facilities have started using their own fleets, and Local Kitchens currently has an open position for Delivery Driver on its jobs website. 

The company says the new funding will allow it to build out more locations in California and eventually expand beyond its home state. 

June 28, 2021

Mobility Service Helbiz Opens Its First Ghost Kitchen

Italian-American mobility company Helbiz announced today it is launching its own ghost kitchen/food delivery/virtual restaurant business called Helbiz Kitchens. The concept will initially be available to customers in Milan, Italy, with plans to open additional locations in the U.S. and Italy in the future.

Helbiz’ main service is operating fleets of e-scooters, e-bikes, and e-mopeds customers can rent on demand via the Helbiz app. Service is available in Italy, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, and a few other U.S. cities. 

The Milan operation of Helbiz Kitchens is housed in a 21,500-square-meter (roughly 23,000 square feet) facility and offers customers a choice of six different menus: pizza, sushi, salad, burger, and ice cream. Customers order and pay via the Helbiz app and can bundle different items from each menu into a single order and payment transaction. 

Couriers, known in the company as “Helbiz Butlers,” will deliver the food using the company’s own electric scooters, which makes sense, given how many of these it currently has in Milan and other cities. The setup is similar in some ways to DoorDash Kitchens, a ghost kitchen operation in Northern California that uses DoorDash couriers to deliver meals to customers from Chick-fil-A and other restaurant chains. Crave Collective, a ghost kitchen/virtual food hall based in Boise, Idaho, also employs its own fleet, despite never having pre-existing mobility infrastructure like DoorDash and Helbiz.

Unlike the other two concepts, however, Helbiz’ food concepts are entirely in-house creations and its team of chefs is entirely employed by the company, not a third-party restaurant. The company’s tech stack, which will power everything from online ordering for consumers to fire times in the kitchen and driver tracking, is also the product of an in-house IT team. 

Part of this focus on keeping things in-house is related to economic recovery. Like most other places, Italy’s economy suffered greatly during the pandemic and is now slowly trying to rebuild. Helbiz says its new ghost kitchen operation will provide 80 new jobs for this first location in Italy, with more to come as the concept expands to other parts of the country.

Service will initially be available, as of today, from 11:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Additional locations are planned for Washington D.C. and other cities in Italy in the future. 

June 28, 2021

2021 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem: Serving Up a Digital Lifeline

In collaboration with TechTable and Culterra Capital, we are pleased to share an updated 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map, sponsored by Back of House, a community of restaurateurs to find and share top-reviewed tech solutions. Download the map here. 

It is an understatement to say that the restaurant industry went through a massive shift since we published our 2019 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map. The pandemic’s economic toll on the industry has been grave, though notably, the toll was not evenly distributed. A higher level of digital maturity was a clear success indicator for most restaurants that survived the crisis (as detailed by McKinsey here). 

Thus, in a year that was challenging for all, we did find one bright spot from the pandemic: many of our past predictions around tech adoption were significantly accelerated, shrinking from years to months. 

In fact, in the past 18 months, technology solutions across the restaurant and hospitality industry evolved at such a fast pace that keeping up with changes proved challenging, even for those of us who work in the space. This rapid rate of adoption in the industry caused even the technophobes in hospitality to rapidly embrace tech solutions. 

The most notable growth areas were in the areas of Ordering/Delivery and On-Premise Ordering/Payments Tech, including kiosks, mobile ordering and payments, and cashierless checkout. In addition to the acrobatic feats from restaurant operators, we also saw tech companies reinventing themselves to stay in business during the pandemic.

With that in mind, we are pleased to share our 2021 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem, which serves as a current heat map of the broader ecosystem (and is clearly not exhaustive). 

Click to Enlarge

In order to help operators, entrepreneurs and investors continue to understand and digest this quickly evolving landscape, we also highlight some of the essential shifts and sector themes below, plus a few predictions for the year to come.

Help Wanted

Finding and securing hospitality staff has never been so challenging. As thousands of hospitality workers were left unemployed by the pandemic, or stymied by the risks of the frontlines, many have moved on to find work in other fields, leaving a huge gap in talent. 

As a result, the urgency to leverage robotics, automation, computer vision, and voice technologies will continue to increase as the hospitality industry aims to do more with less staff. And while discussions around robots within hospitality have always been cautious — because we don’t want to put people out of work — we believe we will continue to see more opportunities in the near-term for human-assisting robots (versus human replacement by robots). 

For example, as restaurant operators seek to offset workforce challenges, there are numerous opportunities for specific task automation of repetitive, dangerous or mundane tasks like dishwashing, precision preparation/cooking, food waste management, bar/food inventory, and quality control.

Another area ripe for automation via AI-driven voice tech includes drive-thrus and digital ordering. When people think of a traditional drive-thru, they likely picture a garbled voice and screaming the order into a speaker, hoping their order is correct. But we are seeing many of the larger chains replacing human voices with automated voice assistants to speed up service, order accuracy, and upsell rates. We’ve seen estimates that drive-thru automation can reduce customer wait time by 10 to 25 percent, which is compelling given that the former CEO of McDonalds previously declared that for every six seconds saved at a drive-thru is equal to an increase of 1 percent in sales.

Ghost Kitchens: It’s Complicated

While many restaurant operators were broadly familiar with the concept of ghost kitchens and virtual brands before the pandemic, these formats are now prevalent in most discussions on the burgeoning post-pandemic restaurant industry. 

Whether part of an existing kitchen or a separate commissary kitchen, the ghost kitchen’s purpose is to fulfill online orders for delivery or pick up. Ghost kitchens have the potential to solve real challenges for their restaurant customers, and there are tremendous variations on the economics, setup, and ideal use cases.

So then what’s so complicated about ghost kitchens? 

The rapid growth in consumer demand for restaurant delivery and the high usage of third-party ordering/delivery apps pushed restaurant operators to explore different avenues to expand their access points and footprint beyond their existing restaurants. 

However success (a.k.a. profitability) within the confines of a ghost kitchen business model is primarily driven by volume of daily orders, average order value, and percentage of direct channel sales versus third-party sales. This is why ghost kitchens are primarily well-suited for larger brands, as most local restaurants simply do not meet the average requirements to warrant a ghost kitchen endeavor. (If you are curious to crunch the numbers, check out this excellent ghost kitchen calculator created by Kitchen Fund.)

Further, the lines are beginning to blur between delivery and ghost kitchen platforms. We are entering a world where these platforms are increasingly supporting their own virtual brands and/or next-gen food courts, oftentimes by using the ordering/menu data captured from current restaurants using their platform. Thus local operators will be battling for market share against larger chains which are using ghost kitchens to extend their reach and volume, as well as additional competition from ghost kitchen platforms themselves.

Enter the The Mobile-Only Experience

Stateside, we’ve increasingly been adopting mobile-first ordering and marketing strategies, but the mobile-only approach (often seen in Asia) wasn’t widely embraced before the pandemic. Now, whether via QR codes, apps or mobile web, there has been a huge shift towards mobile-optimized menus, ordering and payments which eliminate or reduce most employee/customer contact. This can help to improve the guest experience via increased speed and fewer errors. For fine dining, this also saves time/costs in printing and sourcing supplies for paper menus. 

Successful operators will prioritize their tech strategy to capture as much digital data as possible in order to personalize offers, segment customers and influence behavior, and a mobile-first/mobile-only approach creates a compelling opportunity to increase both first-party and third-party data capture.

As it can be dizzying for operators to decide how to best leverage their digital data, we predict high growth for the tech partners which are helping operators utilize customer data to better uphold their brand, funnel customers into more profitable channels, and make better decisions about merchandising, pricing, and promotions.

Aggregators Will Continue to Disrupt the Customer Journey

While many of the technologies we discuss here are more operational, we also want to address the customer search and discovery experience. While this was an important topic in pre-COVID times, it is all the more so now, when disruptions and uncertainties are pushing customers to regularly search for what nearby food options are actually open, and whether they offer delivery, curbside, or takeout options. 

We have also reached a point where Google/Google Maps have become the defacto top of the funnel for a majority of restaurant consumers. Thus it is increasingly critical for restaurant operators to proactively manage their full digital footprint, and provide up-to-date information that customers can trust — especially across all third party platforms. 

For example, even though Google profiles include a link to a restaurant’s own website, that little link is eclipsed by the amount of ad-driven real estate that the third-party aggregators/marketplaces get within each profile. 

Growth Categories to Watch in 2022

  • Voice / Bot Technology
  • Robotics / Automation
  • Shared / Ghost Kitchens
  • Food Safety / Quality (a new category for the 2021 map)
  • Ordering and Payments will continue to evolve
  • Marketing Analytics / CRM, and Order / Delivery (both B2B and consumer-facing marketplaces) will continue to consolidate.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions, and look forward to continuing to follow this sector together in the coming years.

Hear Brita and other restaurant tech leaders at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Virtual Summit on August 17th. A limited number of complimentary tickets are available, so register today!

June 27, 2021

Are You Creating the Next Big Tech Tool for Restaurants?

This is the web version of our newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

This time last year, the restaurant biz was grappling with pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions and innovating on the fly to survive the fallout. Digital menus. Virtual tip jars. Ad-hoc drive-thru windows. These mannequins. 

As the year wore on, much of the restaurant-related innovation turned to tech, a shift more or less forced by the pandemic. By some accounts, technological shifts expected to unfold over the course of a decade happened in a matter of months. Online ordering is the norm for many, which means so, too, are the technologies that power that process, whether in-house creations or third-party platforms. Virtual restaurants run from ghost kitchens are everywhere now, including in existing restaurant locations. Someone’s revamped the automat (see above), the robots are coming, and investors have a sudden interest in funding tech that promises to make the back of house more efficient.

There are also a lot more questions than previously around which tech tools restaurants actually need, where investment is most likely headed (spoiler: it’s the back of house), and, most important, what’s going to bring the most value to everyone’s restaurant experience moving forward. 

We could debate all of that here. Instead, I invite you to tell The Spoon about your restaurant tech innovation this summer at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit, set to take place August 17 virtually. 

Whether you think you’re the next Olo, want to entirely disrupt the drive-thru, or have a robot mannequin to track food waste, The Spoon would like to hear from you. Tell us about it by applying for the Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Innovator Showcase, which will happen as part of the aforermentioned Restaurant Tech Summit. 

The Spoon team and panel of restaurant experts will choose the 10 most interesting teams building innovative and potentially game-changing new products. Those 10 companies will then get an opportunity to do a four-minute pitch about their company that will be featured as part of the main stage at the event.

A few general guidelines apply. Companies need to be at early stage, with fewer than 10 employees and less than $1 million in funding/investment. Companies should also have an actual tech product (software, hardware, etc.)

Your pitch will be seen by attendees at the Restaurant Tech Summit and your company will be covered by The Spoon.

More Headlines

San Francisco Makes Restaurant Fee Caps for Delivery Services Permanent – San Francisco, California voted to permanently cap the fees delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution.

ResQ Raises $7.5M for Back-of-House Restaurant Tech – ResQ, whose software platform manages restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding thus far to $9 million. 

Grubhub and Resorts World Las Vegas Partner on New Hotel Concept – Resorts World Las Vegas has announced a partnership with Grubhub for a new mobile order service. 

June 20, 2021

C3’s 10,000 New Kitchen Partners

Unless you make a point of regularly ordering from virtual restaurants, you may not yet have heard of names like Sam’s Krispy Chicken or Plant Nation. They, along with many others, are delivery-only brands created by C3 (Creating Culinary Communities), a restaurant company that’s lately been on a mission to get these brands into seemingly ever pocket of America. The company’s virtual restaurants are in hotels, residential buildings, and even brick-and-mortar food halls. And thanks to a recent deal, they’ll soon be available via a lot more restaurants, too. 

C3 announced last week it had struck a partnership with point-of-sale integration company Chowly, whose technology platform makes it easier for restaurants to manage online orders coming from multiple sales channels. Through the deal, Chowly’s restaurant customers will get the option to be a “host kitchen” for C3’s virtual restaurants and share in the revenue from those sales. 

Host kitchens, as the name suggests, are spaces within existing restaurant kitchens that are dedicated to fulfilling orders from virtual, delivery-only brands. Companies like Fat Brands and Wow Bao have popularized the concept among restaurants, giving underutilized kitchen space a purpose and hopefully making the business incremental revenue in the process.

In the last year, we’ve also seen the rise of companies whose main business is to come up with new restaurant concepts and license them out to existing restaurants. Besides C3, Ordermark launched its NextBite business based on this idea, and Virtual Restaurant Concepts (best known for Mr. Beast Burgers) offers a similar concept.

C3’s deal with Chowly will give restaurant customers that use the Chowly platform an easier way to sell delivery-only restaurant brands than they could do on their own. Rather than having to conceptualize and figure out how to market and deliver wholly new virtual brands, Chowly’s restaurant partners can simply license a turnkey solution from C3, who handles the marketing, branding, and technical logistics of the operation via its exclusive ordering/delivery app, Citizens Go. The restaurant just has to cook the food and get it out the door.

These restaurants could also potentially reach a wider demographic by offering more food types on top of their own menus. I never thought I’d write “Captain D’s” and “high-end plant-based burger” in the same sentence, but that scenario’s entirely possible since Captain D’s is an enterprise customer of Chowly and C3 has a plant-based brand called Plant Nation. A Captain D’s location also offering Plant Nation for delivery could reach new and different customers and add more revenues through such a deal.

For C3, the deal is arguably even more lucrative. Chowly has more than 10,000 kitchen partners across the U.S., all of whom will eventually be able to licenses C3’s brands. That’s a major jump from the 250 kitchens in which C3 is currently in. The company says it will reach 1,000 locations by the end of the year and be in 12,000 kitchens by 2023.

The Chowly deal will be a huge help to that process — and enable C3 to expand more rapidly than it would if it had to forge each new individual kitchen partnership. Chowly’s enterprise brands include the aforementioned Captain D’s, Clean Juice, and Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, all of which give C3 and automatic sizable reach. 

The partnership will launch with these enterprise brands before branching out to include smaller restaurants within the Chowly network. The goal is to make all of C3’s brands available to all of Chowly’s 10,000 restaurants at some point in the nearish future.

As C3, Virtual Restaurant Concepts, NextBite and other virtual restaurant companies scale up, one question to keep in mind is how these companies are ensuring quality control across tens of thousands of restaurant partners. In other words, Sam’s Krispy Chicken will need to taste the same in Seattle, Washington as it does in Atlanta, Georgia in order to become popular on a large scale over time. An overnight sensation like Mr. Beast is one thing. Sustained, long-term loyalty from customers is another challenge altogether, and one for which consistency and high quality are crucial.

More Headlines

OpenTable Launches New Tools to Discourage Diners From ‘Ghosting’ on Their Reservations – The initiative will take the form of forthcoming new digital tools as well as “blog and social content educating diners on the impact of ghosting a reservation.”

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop – South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris – Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers.

June 9, 2021

JustKitchen Raising $20M, Expanding into the U.S., Asia

Vancouver, Canada-headquartered JustKitchen announced this week it is in the process of raising $20 million to expand its network of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurant brands. The company said it is getting $16 million from Canadian investment dealerr Beacon Securities Limited, which will buy 11.9 million shares of JustKitchen at $1.35 per share. JustKitchen is also looking to raise an additional $4 million.

The company has a number of plans for this new funding, including international expansion, more software development, and some brand acquisition, too.  

JustKitchen operates what it calls “hub-and-spoke” commercial kitchens. Ingredients are prepped in a central main kitchen (the “hub”) and sent to smaller “spoke” kitchens located strategically close to customers. Once a user places an order via the JustKitchens app or website, the spoke kitchen closest to that person completes the order and a delivery service shuttles the meal to its final destination. 

This version of the hub-and-spoke model isn’t widely used at the moment, with most ghost kitchen providers operating traditional commissaries a la Kitchen United or restaurants utilizing space on their own properties. However, the definition of “ghost kitchen” no longer just applies to restaurant food. Another Canadian company, just called Ghost Kitchen, is a good example of this: Ghost Kitchen sells some easy-to-assemble restaurant food, but it also sells pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and packages of Beyond burgers. These simpler types of orders that require minimal prep lend themselves to smaller, spoke-like kitchens closer to customers and powered by a main central kitchen.

In addition to working with third-party restaurant partners, JustKitchen also operates a portfolio of in-house delivery-only restaurants. The company also offers a delivery-only grocery service called JustMarket. Users can add grocery items onto their restaurant meal orders or simply get groceries delivered directly. 

Though based in Vancouver, the company currently only operates its services in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Part of the new funding will go towards opening new spoke kitchens in Taiwan. There are also plans to expand into the western half of the U.S. and into other Asian countries later this year, including Singapore and the Philippines. In the U.S., JustKitchen will begin in Seattle, Washington and several cities in California.

June 9, 2021

Virtual Restaurant Company Curb Raises €20M

Stockholm, Sweden-based ghost kitchen startup Curb announced this week it has raised a €20 million (~$24.4 million USD) round led by Point72 Ventures (h/t tech.eu). EQT, an existing investor, also participated in the round. Curb has now raised €23.2 million to date.

Curb is only a little over one year old, having been founded in May 2020 by ex-Delivery Hero employees Carl Tengberg and Felipe Gutierrez. The company raised an initial €3.2 million in December of last year, which went towards helping the company expand its delivery-only restaurant brands’ presence.

Curb operates what’s essentially a virtual food court, with many of the items meant to evoke street food. It’s collection of delivery-only restaurants include a Mexican-American concept, a burger restaurant, salads and bowls, and chicken wings, among other offerings. All concepts, menus, food preparation, design, and other branding elements are created in-house. Curb also operates its own tech stack. While specific details are not widely available publicly, the company has said it prioritizes data tracking and analysis to improve operations across its supply change as well as monitor customer demands and alter menu items accordingly. 

The company’s operation currently serves customers in Stockholm and Copenhagen, Denmark. Customers of Curb can order via a number of third-party delivery services that differ based on availability in a given location. Orders are prepped and fulfilled in ghost kitchen locations.

Taster, headquartered in London, U.K., is probably Curb’s nearest competitor in terms of what it offers. Like Curb, Taster has its own portfolio of virtual restaurants. Order prep and fulfillment is done in house, and items are available via third-party delivery platforms. The company raised $37 million at the beginning of May. In the U.S., a company called C3 offers a similar model to both Curb and Taster, with restaurant tech company Lunchbox powering the back-end technical capabilities of its virtual food hall.

Curb, meanwhile, says it will use its new funds to further develop its tech stack and grow its overall operations. 

June 7, 2021

Oakland Residents Push Back Against a Forthcoming CloudKitchens Location, Citing Trash, Traffic, and Parking Issues

Residents of Oakland, California are pushing back against the opening of a new ghost kitchen location from Travis Kalanick’s super-secretive CloudKitchens company (h/t Berkeleyside). The facility is slated to open in July. But in an online petition, residents argue that the city of Oakland issued permits for the building quickly “without public notice or any consideration of the impacts on our neighborhood.”

The planned CloudKitchens facility at 5325 Adeline St. in North Oakland will house space for 35 commercial kitchen spaces, which is huge by ghost kitchen standards. The kitchens would operate seven days per week, 18 hours per day, according to the online petition. 

Those opposed include the Golden Gate Community Association and the Oakland Neighborhoods for Equity. These groups as well as residents of the North Oakland neighborhood are pushing for a freeze on construction at the forthcoming CloudKitchens location until the city can address a list of concerns around having a massive ghost kitchen facility in the area. That includes more traffic from the assumed influx of drivers that will be coming and going from CloudKitchens, a loss of parking for neighborhood residents, and “a more dangerous Adeline Street” because of these things. The petition also cites noise, exhaust, odors, and pests as other potential problems. 

This is not the first time CloudKitchens has gotten pushback from residents of a city. Earlier this year, those in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood complained of traffic, parking, and garbage issues from the CloudKitchens facility that opened in 2020. The city finally intervened, but only after police recorded numerous parking violations , calls for disturbance, and crashes in the span of three months.

Nor is this the first time the issue of ghost kitchens’ impact on surrounding neighborhoods come up. As the format has grown in popularity over the last year or so, restaurants, kitchen operators, and city residents alike have surfaced the discussion about the impact of these facilities on daily life and local business, not to mention basic safety on the streets. Talks stand to get even more nuanced as major ghost kitchen operators like CloudKitchens expand and more restaurant chains redesign their store formats to accommodate the uptick in pickup, delivery, and drive-thru orders.

Oakland residents are asking their city to delay the CloudKitchen’s opening as well as its number of food businesses and hours of operation.

May 24, 2021

Square’s Back-of-House Display System Now Available for Delivery-Only Restaurants

Payments company Square recently made its restaurant software stack a little more versatile when it launched its Square KDS back-of-house display system as a standalone item available via subscription. The company says doing so will make Square KDS available to restaurant and kitchen operations that don’t necessarily have a POS system, or even a front of house.

Square’s KDS digitizes the ticket stream coming to into the back of house that chefs use to manage and fulfill orders. The system replaces paper tickets and can process orders coming from multiple different ordering sources, including the restaurant’s POS system, third-party online ordering platforms, and third-party delivery marketplaces. Kitchen staff can view all of these orders on a single screen, which provides a centralized place to see all incoming orders at the same time.

The system also includes features like ticket timers and alerts, performance reports, and customized notifications.

The product was originally released in November of 2020 as part of the Square for Restaurants POS software stack. Nowadays, though, not every business needs a POS system, since not every business has a front of house. Square says that offering KDS as a standalone product is “especially useful” for delivery-only kitchens (aka ghost kitchens) and businesses.

Tech that specifically caters to back-of-house-only operations is becoming more commonplace as more delivery-only restaurant concepts surface. While some of the bigger names in the business, like Kitchen United or iKcon, have developed their own in-house tech stacks, plenty of smaller delivery-only operations may find it easier to license software from third-party companies like Square.

Square KDS is now available as a standalone product in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Ireland. In the U.S., businesses can take advantage of a special price of $10/month per device through the remainder of 2021. Square for Restaurants Plus subscribers can access unlimited Square KDS devices at no additional cost.  

May 18, 2021

A Virtual Restaurant Brand to Support Bitcoin, ‘Take On’ Big Pizza

Bitcoin Pizza Day is coming up, which makes it an apt time to launch a bitcoin-themed virtual pizza restaurant. Anthony Pompliano, an entrepreneur and investor, announced today he is launching Bitcoin Pizza, a pop-up restaurant brand that will partner with independent pizza shops to deliver pies from May 22–29. (May 22 is the official Bitcoin Pizza Day.)

May 22, otherwise known as Bitcoin Pizza Day, will mark the 11-year anniversary of the world’s first commercial transaction done with digital currency — for two pizzas, as it happens. Papa John’s provided the pies at the time, but don’t expect it or any other major chains to be a part of Pompliano’s pop-up shop this weekend. The brand’s website flatly states that “Bitcoin Pizza is the first decentralized pizza brand uniting our favorite neighborhood pizzerias under one roof to take on Big Pizza.”

To do that, the brand has partnered with indie shops around the country, which will make and deliver a special menu of five different pies. Sides and drinks will also be available. Customers can order for delivery or pickup from the Bitcoin Pizza website. So far, participating cities include San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston, Miami, Washington, D.C., NYC, Boston, and Chicago. More are slated to be announced.

Proceeds go to the participating restaurants, and some to the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund. “Every pizza benefits open-source developers working to make the Bitcoin network more private, decentralized, and resilient,” states the Bitcoin Pizza website. 

There’s just one thing Bitcoin Pizza doesn’t do: accept crypto for currency. Right now, customers that order pizzas can pay with a credit card or Google Pay. According to an interview with Restaurant Business, Bitcoin Pizza is looking into adding crypto as a payment option. Which would make sense, given all of the above.

Bitcoin Pizza is a temporary brand for now. According to Popchew, with whom Pompliano worked to launch Bitcoin Pizza, the brand will relaunch as a permanent operation in the near future.

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