It’s no secret that the virtual restaurant space has struggled over the past few years. Longtime operators like Reef, Kitchen United, and NextBite have laid off employees, shut down locations, and, in some cases, sold to another company well below their current valuations.
Those who survived have been rolling up competitors through acquisition and building out their technology stacks. At the top of that list is Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), the company behind virtual restaurant brands like BeastBurger and Pardon My Cheesesteak.
For much of the past year, VDC has stealthily rolled out its new platform, Linked Eats, to restaurants operating within its network. The software, which is the combined result of tech built by VDC for its restaurant partners and technology acquired through the acquisition of Sauce (which built dynamic pricing tech) and Crave Delivery (ghost kitchen software), is described as an ‘AI-powered’ software tool to optimize virtual restaurant operations. The company says Linked Eats helps operators with revenue management (automating uptime, dispute management, error reconciliation), marketing & promotion management, and dynamic pricing.
According to VDC President and Co-founder Robbie Earl, Linked Eats sits on top of existing POS and delivery management software as a “value layer” designed specifically for virtual restaurant brands.
“We work with a number of the middlewares, we work with the DSPs (delivery service providers), and we’re starting to work with the POS companies and tying it all together,” said Earl. “We want to drive you towards automated actions and have an action-oriented product versus a dashboard-oriented product.”
Linked Eats has rolled out its software with 30 partners to four thousand locations over the past six months, including names such as California Pizza Kitchen, Chuck E. Cheese, and Brio Italian Kitchen. In addition to Earl, who is also the co-founder of VDC, Linked Eats is led by company CEO Devin Wade, who came over when VDC acquired the remnants of Wade’s previous company, Crave.
“In just around six months since going live, Linked Eats is already at a run rate of adding over $10 million per year in gross profitability to restaurants,” said Wade in a press release issued to The Spoon.
The expansion into developing a standalone software business alongside its virtual restaurant brand comes after what’s been an extremely active last year for VDC on its virtual brand side. The company once had 20 virtual brands and trimmed that number down to under a dozen.
“We took the number of brands we had – twenty – down to eight, and we’re at ten now.”
Another big challenge VDC faced over the past years was the ongoing lawsuit with MrBeast over BeastBurger, perhaps the most well-known celebrity-branded virtual kitchen effort of all time. According to Earl, the dispute between VDC and MrBeast is still in the courts, but he says we should hear something on the status of that soon.
“We are still operating the brand. It is still on offer and available, but there will be, I think, some other news coming on it soon,” said Earl.
Looking forward, Earl thinks the growth for Linked Eats will be fueled by demand for operators to expand their digital business, whether it’s a digital order for a virtual brand running out of their kitchen or for their own native business.
“The exciting thing is it doesn’t discriminate between a virtual brand and your regular brand. So, with all of the learnings that we have, this massive data set of hundreds of millions of dollars of digital orders that we generate, we now have all those learnings that we can give to you and your brick-and-mortar restaurant.”
You can watch and hear my full conversation with Robbie Earl below.
