This week I spoke with Alex Canter, the CEO and a co-founder of virtual restaurant company Nextbite, to hear his perspective on what 2022 holds for virtual kitchens and restaurants.
Nextbite, based in Denver, Colorado, uses a host kitchen model where it licenses a portfolio of delivery-only restaurant brands to restaurants with excess kitchen capacity. Restaurant partners can fulfill orders under these virtual brands to augment their restaurant’s dine-in and off-premise revenue. By taking on an additional restaurant brand, a restaurant can take advantage of their slowest hours, or even when they might not be open (such as the early morning or late night).
According to Canter, while many restaurants are slowly making their way back from the challenges of COVID-19, most are still not operating at full capacity. “Out of all the restaurants in the U.S., the only restaurant I can say confidently is operating at its full potential is In-and-Out,” said Canter. “They have a line out the door from the moment they open to the moment that they close.”
But this could all change in 2022, in part to new opportunities created by virtual brands. In 2022, “restaurants are really starting to understand their potential,” said Canter. “If you think about the kitchen as a manufacturing facility for food, I would say the average kitchen is probably operating at 30% output of what it could what it can do at peak.” After seeing the spike in virtual kitchens and delivery-only brands, restaurant establishments realize that they can cash in on this too. By streamlining online ordering and offering multiple menus and concepts, restaurants can reach new customers and different demographics.
In total, Nextbite has 17 brands that Canter said have been carefully created to consider emerging dining trends both inside and outside the U.S. People’s tastes and cravings change quickly, and can be easily influenced by social platforms like Tik Tok.
So what food categories and concepts will be successful in the virtual kitchen space in 2022? According to Canter, Pizza and Chinese food – the original delivery food categories – remain very popular. He also said breakfast foods for delivery are on the rise as illustrated by Nextbite’s survey which showed that forty-five percent of consumers ranked breakfast sandwiches as one of their favorite breakfast items to order. Nextbite’s celebrity taco concept, George Lopez Taco, does really well in suburban areas where it can be difficult to find an authentic street taco.
According to Canter, Nextbite works with celebrities like Wiz Khalifa and George Lopez because a small independent restaurant would never be able to connect with a high-profile celebrity. By using one of Nextbite’s celebrity-driven brands, they can tap into a celebrity brand’s following and demand.
Finally, Canter says food preferences vary depending on where you sell and who the consumer is.
Food preference and demand “change a lot when you go from major cities to the suburbs to college campuses. Depending on the demographic, some of our brands absolutely crush it on college campus markets and some do just okay in the suburbs. There’s a lot of variety happening, but I think people’s tastes are changing so faster than ever and we’re keeping up with that by constantly innovating and launching new concepts that are meeting that demand.”
