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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cloud Kitchens

Burger King Launches a Ghost Kitchen Initiative in the UK

Burger King said over the weekend it is trialing its first-ever delivery-only restaurant, a location in London, UK that opened on Sunday. The burger chain said this new venture has the potential to reach over 400,000 customers in the North London area.

For its first delivery-only initiative, Burger King has partnered with FoodStars, the commissary kitchen company bought by Travis Kalnick’s CloudKitchens back in 2019. Customers will be able to order meals for delivery via third-party service Deliveroo. Service from Just Eat and Uber Eats will be available soon, too. 

The expansion to delivery-only service comes just as the UK is in the process of opening back up. From today (May 17), restaurants, cafes, pubs, and bars in England, Scotland, and Wales are finally allowed to serve customers inside, with certain restrictions around social distancing and the size of groups. But while consumers will no doubt flock back to restaurant dining rooms, food delivery is expected to remain a popular option for many. This is less about a fear of the dining room and more about new habits getting established during COVID-19-related lockdowns. Many consumers who had never before ordered delivery got comfortable with the concept during the last year or so, and will continue that behavior for the long term.

Burger King is one of many major QSR chains responding to this change. Chipotle announced its own ghost kitchen initiative in 2020, for example. And many chains are redesigning overall store designs to accommodate more off-premises formats. On its recent earnings call, Wendy’s said 30 percent of a planned 1,200 new locations will be “nontraditional units,” a label that includes delivery-only locations and ghost kitchens. Like Taco Bell and Burger King, the chain has introduced new store designs that feature little or no dining room space.

Burger King has not yet said if its ghost kitchen initiative will expand to other UK locations and eventually to other countries. Presumably, the chain will first test the success of this endeavor before announcing any new delivery-only locations.

Join the Spoon for a Virtual Restaurant Tech Summit This August

For many, 2020 will go down in history as the year the restaurant biz changed forever. It could also be remembered as the year restaurants absorbed about 10 years’ worth of technological evolution in the span of a few months.

But while last year was all about adopting restaurant tech to survive, the next few years will be all about using tech to create a better restaurant experience. I don’t just mean faster service and the ability to pay for meals with your own phone. The most valuable restaurant tech in the future should also create safer dining and working environments, help us reduce food and packaging waste, promote healthier eating habits, and create better new and more fulfilling jobs.

The bottom line is in order to survive, restaurants need to understand how technology will change their business. To that end, The Spoon is announcing our latest event, The Restaurant Tech Summit. The Restaurant Tech Summit will bring together the most important players from across the restaurant industry, from large QSRs and independent establishments to ghost kitchen providers and companies creating the next generation tech stack for restaurants. Together, these companies and individuals will discuss not only how they survived the chaos of 2020 but also what they are doing to thrive — and help others do the same — as they move forward into a digital-first era for restaurants.

The Restaurant Tech Summit will feature founders from building new platforms, to those leading the digital innovation efforts for the largest chains in the country, to chefs and operators using these tools everyday, we’ll have leaders from every side of the restaurant business come together to discuss how technology will transform business and operational models over the next decade.

We already have some great speakers from companies like Wow Bao, Perfect Company, Slice, and we’ll be keeping you updated over the next several weeks as more speakers are added and the full agenda is released.

If you’d like to participate as a sponsor at The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit, drop us a line.

If you’d like to buy a ticket to the Summit, early bird pricing is available through July 15th.

In the meantime, reserve your ticket today.

 

C3 Launches Brick-and-Mortar Food Halls for Its Virtual Restaurants

Over the last year we’ve seen scores of brick-and-mortar eating establishments turn their restaurants into delivery-only concepts. C3, a hospitality company that runs a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands, has chosen to do things the other way around. This week, the company announced Citizens, a network of brick-and-mortar food halls for its virtual brands.

The first location will open this July in New York City, with a second location planned for Atlanta, Georgia and slated to open in 2022. Further Citizens locations are planned for Seattle, Miami, and California.

The 40,000-square-foot Manhattan West location will be part food marketplace, part sit-down restaurant, and will feature all of C3’s existing restaurant brands in addition to new ones. Customers will be able to order meals from kiosks or the C3 app (which the company launched in collaboration with Lunchbox), then choose to either take food to go or eat it onsite. The location will also feature pre-made grab-and-go options.

The forthcoming Atlanta location will offer a similar setup, and also include a delivery option to the surrounding neighborhood. 

All food hall locations will be powered by C3’s in-house tech stack, which includes the Lunchbox-powered ordering software. 

Plenty of virtual food hall concepts exist currently, from Deliveroo Editions to Zuul’s newly launched effort that’s an online marketplace of restaurants working out of the company’s kitchen facility. Few of these have added any physical spaces outside of the kitchens, though that may begin to change as the pandemic recedes and people return to the world of onsite dining.

Citizens is part of C3’s overall plan to expand its restaurant business, which has previously only been available in the form of delivery-only concepts. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Graduate Hotels to run virtual restaurants out of the latter’s kitchen spaces. C3 has also partnered with multiple residential properties.

This week also saw C3 expand for the first time outside of the United States, to the United Arab Emirates. Via a partnership with ghost kitchen network Kitopi, C3’s virtual restaurants will be available through the UAE as of this coming summer.

All Day Kitchens Raises $20M, Launches in Chicago

San Francisco Bay Area-based All Day Kitchens (formerly Virtual Kitchen Co.) announced today it has raised a $20 million Series B round, bringing the company’s total funding to $37.5 million. This round was led by Founders Fund with participation from Khosla Ventures, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, and Opendoor CEO Eric Wu. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Base10 also participated. 

The new funds will support the company’s debut in Chicago, Illinois, which happens today. The company has partnered with a mix of local and independently owned restaurants for its Chicago facility. 

This is All Day Kitchens’ first expansion outside of the Bay Area. Up to now, the company has operated a handful of facilities around that region, where they currently have 10 locations and 16 restaurant partners. That includes San Francisco institutions like Dosa and Nopalito. 

Further locations are planned for San Francisco, as well as in other (to be named) parts of California. All Day Kitchens also plans to set up shop in Texas “within the next year,” according to today’s news announcement.

When the company launched its first kitchen in 2019, delivery-only and distributed kitchens were little-known phrases in the restaurant industry, let alone with the general population. The move towards this format of using kitchens designed specifically for delivery meals was well underway at the start of 2020. To say the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated restaurants’ adoption of the delivery-only kitchen into their operations is the understatement of the week. What was not so long ago a niche concept now sees participation from major QSR brands, fine dining establishments, and celebrities alike. 

One oft-overlooked segment, however, is the one for smaller restaurants and independent chains. Moving forward, All Day Kitchens’ focus on that could be an important point of differentiation. 

Future plans include adding more onsite ordering and pickup at locations, which could start to double as food halls with that functionality. 

ChefHero Rebrands as Notch, Aims to Digitize the Entire Foodservice Supply Chain

Restaurant supply chain software company ChefHero announced today it has officially rebranded as Notch and adjusted its business model to focus on digitizing the wholesale foodservice supply chain for both restaurants and distributors.

As ChefHero, the Toronto, Ontario-based company’s platform mainly focused on connecting restaurants with suppliers, providing what was essentially a marketplace for buyers. For a long time, the business was largely driven by restaurant food order volume. Needless to say, when the COVID-19 pandemic closed restaurant dining rooms and impacted overall restaurant sales, ChefHero’s business took a hit as well. In a recent interview, the company said its revenue in March 2020 decreased by 80 percent week-over-week.  

In response, the company rebuilt its software platform with a new focus on both restaurants and food distributors, and rebranded the entire operation as Notch. The software is available via an iOS and Android app. 

For restaurants, the Notch platform offers one central, digital place to view all suppliers, create inventory lists, and view details such as cutoff times and order minimums for each supplier. Via the Notch Market feature, businesses can also get deals on pricing, compare prices across different suppliers, online invoicing and bookkeeping, and use real-time inventory management. The platform integrates into a business’s existing accounting and inventory management systems. 

Digitizing such tasks in the restaurant back of house can help businesses cut down on waste, whether it’s in the form  of food or finances. Notch says that up to 40 percent of a restaurant’s revenue is spent on food, 12 percent of which goes to waste before it ever reaches the customer. 

Meanwhile, the Notch Connect feature lets foodservice distributors build a digital storefront on the platform and connect with restaurants. Distributors can also manage invoices and collections, accept digital payments, and view all customers from one central dashboard. 

Notch is currently available to customers in Toronto as well as in Chicago, Illinois and “major cities” in Texas. The company plans to launch in additional cities in North America in the coming months.  

Delivery Hero’s Tackling a Major Hurdle to More Diversity in Tech

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When Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero launched its recent Tech Academy recently, it showed us one way to create both more and better jobs in the restaurant industry — and make those available to a wider swath of the population. The question is, Will the Delivery Hero Tech Academy be successful enough to influence others in the increasingly tech-centric restaurant industry?

The Tech Academy will teach tech skills to “underrepresented groups” to promote more diversity and inclusion, and also give people more options when it comes to finding a job. To do this, Delivery Hero teamed up with the Digital Career Institute (DCI). Founded in 2016 in Berlin, DCI was originally launched as a way to help refugees get jobs in the tech world. (This was in the wake of the record 1.3 million asylum seekers that came to Europe in 2015.) The organization now operates four locations across Germany and works with over 600 companies to link DCI graduates to job opportunities. 

The Delivery Hero Tech Academy will teach coding languages (Java and Python are specifically called out), and the 9.5-months-long program is free to all participants. Those participants may also get an opportunity to move into a permanent position on a backend development team at Delivery Hero following the program. While that’s not a complete guarantee, participants presumably won’t be left out in the cold after graduation, either. DCI’s large network of partner companies will no doubt provide other potential opportunities.

A lack of diversity has long been a major problem in tech. Companies and leaders have made efforts in the form of diversity reports and pledges to do more, but critics have said these efforts will “ring hollow” until changes show up in diversity data.

At the same time, the restaurant industry is getting increasingly digitized thanks to the shift towards to-go orders (e.g., delivery) and digital ordering, payment, and management platforms. Theoretically, the switch could create not just more jobs in the industry but jobs that pay higher, are less dangerous, offer the kinds of challenges that make work fulfilling, and lead to new career opportunities down the line.

For many around the world, the above litany remains firmly out of reach. In fact, it’s more common for refugees, undocumented workers, and those with less formal education to wind up working the last mile of delivery. And if there’s one job type that’s the antithesis of safe, fulfilling work that pays well, it’s gig worker jobs like food delivery.

Restaurant tech companies have been saying for a couple years now that they don’t want their AI, automation, and robotic platforms to displace workers. Rather, they want that tech to take over the dirty, dangerous, and boring pieces of the restaurant so that human workers can focus on the proverbial “more meaningful” tasks. So far, few have defined what “meaningful” is in this technocentric restaurant world, or how one manages to acquire the skills to get there.

Until now, that is. By helping to provide he education needed to get into the tech part of restaurant tech, Delivery Hero is addressing an area that’s until now not really been talked about. Let’s hope the Tech Academy can start to change that, and inspire other restaurant tech companies to do the same.

More Headlines

Too Good To Go Expands Its Food Waste App Nationally Across the U.S.: The company announced its plans to expand service for its food-waste-fighting platform across the United States, following a successful program in select East Coast states.

Foodetective Raises $2M in Seed Funding: Switzerland-based Foodetective raised funds for its B2B software, which is an operations platform restaurants can use to organize and run their many disparate pieces of software and view them from a single dashboard.

Over Half of U.S. Consumers Are Comfortable Dining in Restaurants: More than half of U.S. consumers (60 percent), are comfortable with the idea of dining out at a restaurant, according to new data from tech intelligence firm Morning Consult. 

Anatomy of a Digital Restaurant

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When Taster, a virtual restaurant company headquartered in London, announced its $37 million fundraise last week, co-founder and CEO Anton Soulier made clear that his company is trying to “redefine what it means to be a restaurant group in the 21st century.”

The company, founded in 2017, started out cooking food for its virtual restaurant brands from its own dedicated kitchen spaces then selling items via third-party delivery platforms like Uber Eats. Previously, Soulier was an early team member at Deliveroo, so he knows a thing or two about doing a delivery business — most importantly, how delivery has to continue to evolve.

Along those lines, Taster is taking a slightly different approach to the virtual restaurant nowadays. Instead of making the food itself, Taster licenses its five brands out to existing restaurants. The setup brings benefits to both sides. Restaurants can to make extra revenue by selling more delivery orders to not just their existing customers but fans of the virtual brands. Taster gets to expand faster, since it’s no longer having to handle every single order itself or build out kitchen infrastructure. As of last check, the company, which also has teams in Paris and Madrid, has more than 60 restaurant sites in nine cities acorss the UK, France, and Spain. The new funding, a series B round led by Octopus Ventures, will ensure further expansion for Taster’s brands.

In many ways, Taster could be seen as something of a blueprint for the digital-age restaurant chain, because it gathers a few different concepts that are popular into a single platform:

Underutilized Kitchen Space

Taster’s current model is built on helping restaurants put underutilized kitchen space to work. Businesses with extra kitchen space can license one or more of Taster’s restaurant brands and run it out of their own properties. It’s a way of offering a delivery brand without incurring the expense of a long lease with a traditional commissary space, which is too expensive for many restaurants. 

This “license a virtual restaurant” approach has become more commonplace over the last several months. Chicago-based Wow Bao started licensing a delivery-only version of its menu to other restaurants in 2020. Ordermark created an entire sister business around connecting restaurants with underutilized space to virtual brands. Restaurant company C3 has taken the concept beyond restaurants and is licensing its virtual food brands to hotels and luxury apartment properties.

Menus Designed for Delivery

From its inception, Taster has billed itself as a digital food court, serving up street food reimagined for delivery. In other words, the food is supposed to travel well. The company also involved Michelin-star chefs in the design of all its restaurant brands’ menus. 

In theory, at least, that ensures a certain level of quality stays intact throughout the entire journey the food takes from the kitchen to the customer. Even before the pandemic turned most of the restaurant biz into one giant takeout operation, issues with food quality were a major problem for delivery. This is another reason restaurants are now creating or licensing virtual brands instead of trying to repurpose their existing menus for to-go boxes. Under this arrangement, dining room food gets to stay where it belongs, in the dining room, and delivery orders are comprised of food that was built for travel.

Versatile Tech

Good food is the single most important part of any virtual restaurant. Arguably, the runner up is technology. It’s not enough anymore for a system to be simply be able to process digital orders and payments. Because of the growing order volume, delivery tech also needs to integrate with the back of house operations, track inventory and drivers, communicate with customers and integrate with the restaurant’s main POS system. It also needs to be able to integrate with third-party delivery services a la Uber Eats or Deliveroo.

To run a virtual restaurant out of their own kitchens, restaurants could cobble together various third-party solutions to get the above features under one roof. Or they could attempt to build an in-house system from the ground up. Both approaches have their drawbacks, from time and money to compatibility issues between different pieces of software. 

It’s another reason licensing a brand from a company like Taster or C3 or NextBite seems more practical at this point. Taster’s system, for example, can process orders and payments, help manage the kitchen, and track quality control, among other things. Users can also choose whether they want to order Taster brands via third-party delivery apps or Taster’s in-house app. Restaurants licensing Taster’s brands need not actually concern themselves with any of these logistical puzzles — the company handles all of the technology itself. C3’s tech is very similar, and there will doubtless be plenty of other such systems emerging in the near future.   

There’s little chance this “license a virtual restaurant” model will go out of vogue once lockdown restrictions ease and more cities around the world reopen their economies. Off-premises meal formats like delivery are at this point a normal part of doing business for restaurants. And as Taster’s recent fundraise suggests, interest in the evolution of the virtual restaurant is higher than ever.

Landry’s a restaurant group that owns Morton’s The Steakhouse and Bubba Gump’s Shrimp, said in a recent interview that most of the company’s restaurant brands will start accepting bitcoin as payment in the coming months. CEO Tilman Fertitta cited “the next 90 days” as a timeframe.

Starbucks is using its AI technology, Deep Brew, to further improve personalization for customers but also to track vaccination progress throughout the world, the company said on its recent earnings call.

Uber recently announced a new feature,  Pickup and Go, that lets rideshare users see nearby restaurants and order/pickup food while they are in transit.

C3 and Lunchbox Launch a New App to Power Virtual Food Halls

Virtual restaurant company C3 and online order platform Lunchbox announced today the launch of a new restaurant app, CITIZENS GO. The app will provide ordering and delivery services for C3’s growing network of ghost kitchens, which number over 200 at this point, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Via CITIZENS GO, which is available for both iPhone and Android, users can access C3’s growing list of delivery-only brands, which the company fulfills in various ghost kitchen spaces around the country, including in residential buildings. To start, CITIZENS GO will be available in Los Angeles, Northern California, New York City, and Chicago. Miami, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Atlanta are slated for the near future. 

Lunchbox’s tech powers the back end of the app when it comes to processing orders and facilitating delivery. The two companies first partnered in October of 2020 to create this virtual food hall, and the resulting CITIZENS GO app has been in the works ever since.  

Among other things, Lunchbox is known for its online order tech that lets restaurants process and fulfill off-premises orders without the need for third-party delivery services like DoorDash or Uber Eats.

A notable feature of the new CITIZENS GO app is its ability to bundle orders from multiple different restaurant brands into a single transaction for the user. For example, a customer might have a craving for both a Plant Nation burger and something from Sam’s Krispy Chicken. Rather than having to create a separate transaction for each virtual restaurant (which is still required of users on third-party delivery services), customers can put anything they want on the app into a single shopping basket and pay on one ticket. 

The bundling concept is actually quite complicated to enable from a technological standpoint, so it isn’t yet widespread in restaurant world. But as Lunchbox’s platform illustrates, more restaurant tech companies are starting to offer solutions to enable the concept. An Ontario, Canada-based company called Ghost Kitchens has its own tech to bundle orders from its kitchens, and Kitchen United developed its own in-house tech to do the same for its facilities. 

Most operations, however, will be most likely to do what C3 did and partner with a third-party restaurant tech company to enable this bundling capability. At some point in the not-so-distant future, said feature will become a de facto part of the restaurant tech stack, particularly in the ghost kitchen.

In the meanwhile, C3 said in its press release today that new restaurant brands will be added to the app “in the coming months” to the CITIZENS GO mobile app.

The Next Big Tech for the Virtual Food Hall

Here’s a concept that seems stupidly simple but is actually a technologically complex feat: letting customers order from multiple virtual restaurants with a single digital transaction.

As ghost kitchens multiply, the idea of housing multiple restaurant concepts under one roof grows ever-more commonplace, be it Kitchen United’s Mix platform, Crave Collective’s virtual food hall or individual restaurants cooking up more than one menu in their kitchens.

Until recently, customers wanting to order from such facilities had to do so through third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash, making a separate transaction for each brand they ordered from, despite those brands being physically housed under the same roof. While that’s not the biggest problem the world has ever faced, it does add the so-called friction to the customer ordering experience. And these days, the restaurant biz is all about getting rid of friction.

It follows, then, that some are working to change this siloed ordering process for customers. In the first place, more ghost kitchen/virtual food hall organizations have their own digital ordering properties. Kitchen United has its Mix platform where customers can order from several different brands via the KU website. Crave Collective has 16 different brands available via single app. Restaurant tech company Lunchbox is powering C3’s virtual food halls, making all choices accessible from a single interface.

In addition to letting customers ditch the third-party delivery services and order directly from the ghost kitchen or virtual food hall, these digital properties (and others) also let customers mix and match meals from multiple different restaurant brands.

Speaking to me for a Spoon Plus report recently, Kitchen United’s Chief Business Office Atul Sood called this idea “multi-concept ordering,” and suggested many more virtual operations will soon offer it.

The idea is simple: Take a bunch of different virtual restaurants housed in a single ghost kitchen and make them all available via a single interface (e.g., an app or website). Consumers can mix and match orders from different businesses, pay for them with a single transaction, and get all the food delivered at once.

The execution of this idea is less simple. As Sool explained, “bundling” different concepts is a technologically complex feat and therefore an expensive and time-consuming endeavor for businesses to attempt.

Imagine a family where one person wants a burger, another wants Chinese food, and another prefers pizza. They want to order all their items at once and have them arrive via the same delivery driver at the same time.   

To do that, there are a few different considerations. First of all, the concepts have to be under one roof — hence the rise of ghost kitchens and virtual food halls a la Kitchen United Mix. Additionally, the fire times need to be coordinated across those different concepts. A poke bowl and a rack of ribs don’t take the same amount of time to prepare, and coordinating those pieces is “a technological challenge,” according to Sood. 

KU Mix has solved for these and other challenges by building out its own in-house technology system. The company has even launched a version of it outside the walls of its own facilities. At Westfield Malls, it is installed to enable a more digital and off-premises-friendly food court experience, for example. “It doesn’t make sense for a restaurant to develop this type of technology [themselves],” said Sood. “It just makes sense for for them to license it from from somebody else.”

Kitchen United Mix is one example of this technology at work. It also seems to be an obvious opportunity for restaurant tech companies in general, since there aren’t many platforms yet specializing in this type of functionality. I doubt the playing field stays empty for long, though. Demand for digital ordering is only going to increase, and even outside of the virtual food hall, there are plenty of relevant contexts for this multi-concept ordering: sport venues. airport food courts, the aforementioned mall. Those areas of life may not be back in full swing quite yet, but when they return, they’ll include many more digital processes, including how we get our food items. 

The Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, a kind of automat for the 21st Century, has inked a franchise deal to bring eight new units of its concept to the state of New Jersey. The first location will open this summer in Hoboken.

Pizza Hut has added drive-thru lanes to more than 1,500 of its U.S. restaurants. Dubbed “The Hut Lane” option, it’s available for orders placed through the chain’s website and mobile app, and over the phone in select locations.

Speaking of pizza, restaurant tech company Slice recently launched a POS system exclusively for pizzerias. According to a company press release, this “will put the same tech tools and data insights that Domino’s franchisees receive directly into the hands of independent pizzeria owners.”

Spain’s Glovo Lands €450M to Expand Its Dark Convenience Store Delivery Business

Delivery service Glovo announced today it has raised €450 million (~$528 million USD) in Series F funding. The round was led by Lugard Road Capital and the Luxor Capital Group, with participation from returning investors Delivery Hero, Drake Enterprises, and GP Bullhound. 

Barcelona, Spain-based Glovo says that this fundraise — its largest to date — will go towards expanding Glovo’s reach in the 20 markets in which the company already operates. In particular, the company will expand its Q-Commerce, aka ghost convenience store, division in these areas. 

Customers order online from these convenience stores, which carry food and household items and deliver goods to customers in 30 minutes or less. Glovo launched its concept of the dark convenience store delivery in 2019 as a way to stand out from other delivery services, most of which were focused primarily on restaurant food at the time. Glovo said today it can provide delivery in 10 minutes or less in some urban areas, and that it anticipates “a permanent shift in consumer habits towards same-day and instant delivery.”

Recent funding in the realm of super-quick delivery suggests the same. In Europe, that includes Berlin-based Gorillas, which raised $290 million in March, Italy’s Everli, which just raised $100 million, and Rohlik, a Czech Republic-based company that recently nabbed $230 million. Activity (and investment) is equally big in the states, notably with Fridge No More’s $15.4 million fundraise and a whopping $1.5 billion for GoPuff last month.

Glovo plans to have 200 dark convenience stores running by the end of 2021. Currently, they are in Barcelona and Madrid in Spain as well as Lisbon, Portugal and Milan, Italy. Future stores are planned for Valencia, Spain; Porto, Portugal; Rome, Italy; and Bucharest, Romania.

As part of this q-commerce growth, Glovo will also build up its deals with major supermarkets. Right now, its roster of stores includes Carrefour, Continente, and Kaufland.

Tracking the Next Generation of To-Go Concepts for Restaurants

This shift towards delivery and other off-premises formats was already underway. Back in 2019, the National Restaurant Association predicted that by 2030 off-premises would drive most of the growth for restaurant sales. 

Suffice to say, the pandemic sped that timeline up. In the words of Ordermark’s cofounder and CEO Alex Canter (whose family also owns famed L.A. restaurant Canter’s Deli), “10 years of progress maybe happened in a couple of months, not out desire, but really out of necessity.”

Out of that progress have come many different ways and tactics to approach delivery and takeout formats, from iterating on the virtual restaurant concept to altering the cooking process of the meal itself. This intelligence briefing for Spoon Plus will look at some some off-premises success stories to come out of the pandemic-era restaurant industry.

This content is exclusive to Spoon Plus. To learn more about membership, click here.

C3 to Bring Ghost Kitchens to Residential Buildings

Ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant network C3 (Creating Culinary Communities) today announced a partnership with apartment operator Akera Living to place ghost kitchens inside the latter’s Kenect communities.

Kenect bills itself as a combination coworking space, social club, and residential community that’s become increasingly popular in urban settings over the last few years. Since the idea seems to be to jam as many amenities as possible under one roof, ghost kitchens were bound to show up in this setting sooner or later.

For Kenect properties, C3 kitchens will not only serve up delivery-only meals to residents, they will also provide food and drink for Kenect’s lobby bars, building cafes, and pool areas. For residents ordering in, C3’s virtual restaurant brands will be available.

The company will launch its kitchens in summer 2021 at Kenect buildings in Nashville, Tennessee and Phoenix, Arizona, with upcoming locations planned for more U.S. cities soon. 

The partnership is not unlike C3’s deal with Graduate Hotels, which was announced earlier this year. For that partnership, C3 is taking over the hotel chain’s culinary spaces and converting them into “multi-branded kitchens” that will serve C3 virtual brands to hotel guests and community residents. 

The company’s expansion tactic is somewhat unique in the ghost kitchen world right now. Whereas most ghost kitchen-virtual food hall operations are currently in standalone facilities that require cars to deliver the food, C3 seems to want to bring the ghost kitchen as close as possible to customers. This concept of making a ghost kitchen a standard amenity on high-end properties isn’t widespread yet, though it will probably become so quickly, at least within the luxury property format. Whether it can translate to other settings remains to be seen.