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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Reef Kitchens

800 Degrees Teams Up With Reef, Plans to Open 500 Ghost Kitchens

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.

Singapore’s TiffinLabs Will Launch Its Tech-Driven Virtual Restaurant Network in the U.S. in 2020

Singapore-based food tech company TiffinLabs announced this week it has acquired access to kitchen space in 1,000 locations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to create a global network of virtual restaurant brands.

The company, which was founded in 2019, is known for the nine different virtual restaurant brands it operates out of its kitchens in Singapore. According to a press release, TiffinLabs will bring five of these brands to the U.S., starting in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Austin in the fourth quarter of 2020. It also has plans to bring its restaurants to London, Manchester, and Birmingham in the U.K.

TiffinLabs uses what it calls an “AI-driven kitchen operating and management system” to “identify food trends and consumer preferences.” In other words, the company identifies food trends and demands in specific areas and plans its locations and cuisine types around those factors. The company also uses this data-driven model to improve improve its ingredient supply chain and research and develop the best packaging for delivery meals. 

It is one of several restaurant chains that is currently focused on creating global virtual brands and ghost kitchens. Fat Brands recently partnered with Epic Kitchens to open 20 ghost kitchens across the U.S. And Phillipenes-based Jollibee just opened its first ghost kitchen in Chicago. Other big-name brands — Chick-fil-A and the Halal Guys among them — have partnered with the likes of Kitchen United and DoorDash to get their food into areas where they do not necessarily have standalone locations.

TiffinLabs’ founder and chairman Kishin RK said in a statement that over the next three years, we’ll see two types of winners in the ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant space: local niche players creating specialty cuisine and global delivery players that serve all parts of the globe. TiffinLabs looks to be aiming for the latter category with its forthcoming expansion.