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MrBeast Burgers’ Overnight Success Actually Holds Some Lessons for Aspiring Virtual Restaurants

by Jennifer Marston
December 22, 2020December 22, 2020Filed under:
  • Business of Food
  • Cloud Kitchens
  • Delivery & Commerce
  • Featured
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You know the virtual restaurant movement is catching on when a famous YouTuber gets involved and their efforts are a massive overnight success. This week, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, teamed up with a company called Virtual Dining Concepts and launched a virtual restaurant brand called MrBeast Burgers. The restaurant is already serving 300 locations across the U.S., according to a press release sent to The Spoon and a very excited tweet from Donaldson from the weekend:

https://twitter.com/MrBeastYT/status/1340425884344463360?s=20

Donaldson is a YouTuber who is as famous at this point for his large charitable donations and other philanthropy as he is for his online stunts. He unveiled MrBeast Burgers over the weekend via his own YouTube channel and a one-day pop-up event in Wilson, North Carolina, where he gave free food to, well, thousands, it seems, along with some iPads, cash, and a new car.

Those interested can get the delivery-only menu via the MrBeast app and on the major third-party delivery platforms. Virtual Dining Concepts said in this week’s press release that it worked with Donaldson’s team to create the menu, which includes burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, and other quick-service staples. 

Restaurants can add the MrBeast menu to their existing operations and essentially run the restaurant out of their own kitchen. The concept isn’t brand new. Wow Bao and others have been running similar “dark kitchen” businesses for some time. However, the MrBeast brand’s popularity may push the concept into the mainstream, given the practically overnight popularity of the initiative.

As to the quality of the actual food, the initial response is a patchwork at best. My very unscientific glance at some recent tweets turned up everything from complaints about the high prices and uncooked meat to high praise and overseas followers begging for international locations.

Even so, the whole thing is another piece of evidence that branding is critical for virtual restaurants to be a success. We talked about that at length a couple weeks ago at our ghost kitchen event (you can view the sessions here), with the majority of restaurant industry panelists agreeing that it’s much easier to start a virtual restaurant operation when you have an existing platform and recognition. Otherwise you’re just the random dude who wants to sell chicken wings but can’t stand out from the masses of folks trying to do the same thing.

Jimmy Donaldson is not a chef, but nor is he a random dude, as his nearly 49 million YouTube following can attest. But overnight success and longevity are two distinctly different things. The big takeaway here for anyone wanting to launch a virtual restaurant is that the food, customer service, speed, and efficiency matter more than ever in today’s to-go focused restaurant industry. Fifty million fans is one thing. Fifty million fans that love you because of your food is an entirely different, and more difficult, feat to pull off.


Related

MrBeast: I Want To Move On From Beast Burger, Enjoy Feastables ‘100x More’

As the virtual restaurant and ghost kitchen business has struggled for much of the past year, proponents pointed to the success of MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant chain started by the YouTube star that expanded to over 300 contracted restaurants and included some physical restaurants. But now it looks like…

A Tale of Two Ghost Kitchens: Why Wow Bao Wowed and MrBeast Bombed

This week, James Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, sued Virtual Dining Concepts, the company behind his virtual restaurant brand. In the lawsuit, MrBeast and his legal team claim that "Virtual Dining Concepts was more focused on rapidly expanding the business as a way to pitch the virtual restaurant model to…

Chris Young on MrBeast: “Everything Just Changed About Restaurants” (Podcast)

If you want to be a chef, the first thing Chris Young thinks you should do before parting ways with a king's ransom in the form of time and money at culinary school is to just jump directly into the fire. "If you think you might want to be a…

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  • MrBeast Burgers
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