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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

virtual restaurants

iKcon Raises a $5M Pre-Seed Round for Its Ghost Kitchen Network

Cloud kitchen startup iKcon announced today it has raised a $5 million pre-seed round led by Arzan VC, AlTouq Group and Nazer Group. This brings iKcon’s total funding to $10 million. 

The Dubai-based company, founded in 2019 by CEO Khalid Baareh and COO Kareem Abughazaleh (pictured above), operates a network of 10 cloud kitchens across the United Arab Emirates.

The company says it “acts as a franchisee” on behalf of restaurant brands, catering to both chains with existing brick-and-mortar operations as well as delivery-only virtual restaurants. iKcon’s kitchens also provide space for some CPG brands. 

Besides expanding its kitchen network, iKcon notes it will also use the new funds to further develop its proprietary technology platform, which it says uses AI and data analytics to improve operations in the kitchen. 

That tech will be an important differentiator for cloud kitchen companies across the board to improve as time goes on. For all their promises of low overhead costs and streamlined setups, cloud kitchens are still operationally intensive businesses that rely on lots of humans to cook, package, and deliver the food. With many restaurants around the world in danger of shuttering permanently because of the pandemic, delivery-only brands look more promising every week for some businesses. And as we discussed in our recent Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens, the industry as a whole is moving towards more tech and automation to bring down costs, whether they’re time, money, or resources.

The cloud kitchen market itself is inching towards $1 trillion by 2030. iKcon’s fundraise is just the latest, following Zuul’s $9 million round and Kitopi’s $60 million fundraise.

For its part, iKcon says says it plans to expand to Saudi Arabia in the fourth quarter of 2020 and to other countries in 2021. 

The Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens

When 2020 began, the ghost kitchen topic poised to be one of the “it” trends to watch over the coming 12 months. Venture capital was pouring into the space, virtual restaurants of all types were popping up, and major quick-service chains were inking deals left and right with ghost kitchen providers. When The Spoon launched its (now outdated) ghost kitchen market map at the end of 2019, we predicted there would be an explosion of virtual restaurant brands and that some major chains would make ghost kitchens a normal part of doing business. 

Nobody predicted a pandemic would swoop in and irrevocably upset the restaurant industry down to its very foundation, which was built on consumers eating meals in dining rooms.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s dire consequences for the restaurant industry cannot be understated, and it would take an entire report of its own to outline just how far-reaching and long lasting the effect will be. A quick overview shows that:

All of this has led to a shift in business models that was underway already but has been accelerated. Off-premises order formats were poised to become restaurants main sales drivers over the next decade. Since the pandemic essentially forced restaurants into a to-go-or-die mentality, that is happening much faster now. 

That in turn has ramped up demand for ghost kitchens. However, just because restaurants are closing and off-premises orders are rising rapidly doesn’t necessarily mean every restaurant should follow the same trajectory when considering a ghost kitchen.

This report examines the kinds of ghost kitchens available to restaurants, the elements they need to consider before actually starting one, and opportunities and challenges in the space.  Companies profiled in this report include: Kitchen United, Kitopi, DoorDash Kitchens, Rebel Foods, CloudKitchens, Zuul Kitchens, ChefReady, Deliveroo Editions, Panda Selected, Muy, Reef Technology, Fat Brands, Brinker International, Wow Bao, The Halal Guys, Keatz, Middleby/Lab2Fab.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

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.

Week in Restaurants: Ghost Kitchens Might Be Hurting Small Businesses

Food delivery has a dark side. That we knew, but it does seem to be getting more airtime lately, with legislators and restaurants alike pushing back against some (okay, most) of the practices companies like DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats employ. We saw more of that this week when a San Francisco restaurant owner took Grubhub to task and urged others to join her. Judging from Grubhub’s latest earnings call, though, the service isn’t budging on certain practices.

Read on for more on those as well as other noteworthy restaurant news from around the web this week.

Ghost Kitchens Get an Oversight Hearing in NYC

Ghost kitchens are all the rage, but not everyone is thrilled with them. On Thursday, New York City council members held an oversight hearing to discuss whether ghost kitchens are a friend or hindrance to local business, and if they need to be regulated. “Are you a threat to our mom-and-pop restaurants, or should you be embraced as a partner that’s going to help them continue to flourish and grow?” councilmember Mark Gjonaj asked ghost kitchen operators at the hearing. (Gjonaj has also been vocal when it comes to third-party delivery in NYC.)

Kitchen United CEO Jim Collins was present, as was Zuul Kitchens cofounder Corey Mancione. While regulatory measures were not discussed, the event definitely puts a spotlight on the more controversial aspects of ghost kitchens. The main debate at last night’s hearing was whether ghost kitchens hurt small, independent restaurants by lessening overhead costs for bigger chains, who have the deep pockets to more easily embrace off-premises ordering.

Image via Unsplash.

TripAdvisor Unveils a Review Aggregator for Restaurant Operators

TripAdvisor launched a new tool on Wednesday that aggregates restaurant reviews from multiple websites so that owners and operators can view all of them from a single dashboard. Dubbed Review Hub, the subscription-based feature gathers reviews from Facebook, Google, Yelp, and “other major review sites” into one place. The aggregated view promises restaurant owners an easier, faster way to spot trends in feedback, see what’s working and what isn’t, and respond to customers more consistently. Subscriptions are available on both a monthly and annual basis.

Planet Hollywood Founder Launches a Virtual Restaurant Network

Robert Earl, known as the founder of Planet Hollywood, has launched a virtual restaurant concept called Wing Squad, which is available exclusively through third-party delivery platforms Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Postmates. The online menu is fairly streamlined, offering up just wings, sides, and a few desert options, all of which is cooked in ghost kitchens. The restaurant is currently available in 16 cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Detroit, and Las Vegas. Earl, whose Earl Enterprises owns chains like Buca di Beppo and Earl of Sandwich, said in a statement that Wing Squad is part of his Virtual Dining Concepts network. Other online-only restaurants are coming soon.

Grubhub Added 150,000 Non-Partnered Restaurants

Grubhub beat Wall Street estimates for Q4 2019 in what was a drastic change from the company’s dismal third-quarter results. Part of the third-party delivery service’s efforts in Q4 included doubling its restaurant inventory by adding 150,000 non-partnered restaurants — that is, restaurants that do not have contracts with the service and have not given permission to Grubhub to use their menus online. The controversial tactic is also used by Postmates and DoorDash. While Grubhub defends the strategy, saying it is meant to reverse the slowdown in daily orders, more and more restaurant owners are speaking out against the practice, turning the issue into the latest battle between restaurants and delivery services. Mark Gjonaj, over to you.  


Spoon Market Map: Ghost Kitchens in 2019

Just half a decade ago, the phrase “ghost kitchen” referred to restaurants that looked legit on Grubhub and Seamless but were actually digital fronts for unregulated kitchens. In other words, chicken tenders from what appeared to be a local restaurant might actually have been cooked in someone’s apartment.

Then the delivery boom went off, thanks largely to the growth of third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash, and by the many digital channels through which customers could suddenly get food. Order tickets proliferated for restaurants, but so too did the stress around how to fulfill those orders without over-burdening the in-house kitchen staff.

The answer to the problem? Take the restaurant out of the kitchen.

In the last few years, restaurants have been moving many of their operations around delivery and to-go orders to dedicated kitchen spaces outside the main restaurant location. The name “ghost kitchen” has stuck around, but now it’s a health-department-friendly term for these spaces that act as hubs for off-premises orders.

But actually, there are many names nowadays for the concept: ghost kitchen, virtual kitchen, cloud kitchen, the (slightly nauseating) description “kitchen as a service.” All those phrases amount the same thing: a kitchen facility that exists solely for the purpose of helping restaurants cook and fulfill to-go orders and get them into the hands of delivery couriers. There is no dining room or front-of-house staff in a ghost kitchen, the tech-stack is more streamlined than that of a full-service restaurant, and, increasingly, the location is completely separate from a restaurant’s dine-in location(s). Now, too, there are also kitchens on (literal) wheels, which add yet-another piece of mobility to the business model. 

To help you navigate the evolving world of ghost kitchens, we’ve created a market map for your reference. This market map is intended to be a snapshot of the current ghost kitchen landscape in 2019. It’s not comprehensive, and we expect both it and the overall landscape to change drastically over the next 12 months. That means you can expect to see this map updated regularly. As always, we welcome suggestions for additional companies and players in this space.

Have suggestions? Drop us an email.

1. Kitchen Infrastructure Providers

The largest category in ghost kitchens right now, Kitchen Infrastructure Providers can be likened to cloud computing providers: they rent companies the space and tools needed to run a business, either as a flat-fee model for on a pay-as-you-go basis. 

Kitchen United, for example, charges a monthly membership fee that includes rent, equipment, storage, and services like dishwashing. Reef, which originally made a name for itself reinventing the concept of the parking garage, offers these things as well as direct partnerships with major third-party delivery companies like DoorDash and Postmates.   

Normally these facilities are large, warehouse-like buildings that hold multiple “restaurants” under a single roof. For large restaurant operators with multiple chains looking to fulfill extra demand brought on by delivery or test out new concepts without incurring too much risk, these are ideal.

Multi-unit chains can also use these spaces to reach customers in areas where they might not have a brick-and-mortar store. Chick-fil-A is widening its reach in the SF Bay Area by working out of DoorDash’s newly opened facility.

2. Restaurant-operated Kitchens

For some restaurants, running a ghost kitchen operation themselves makes more sense than teaming up with a third-party kitchen provider. This is often the case with smaller, independent restaurants, whose ghost kitchen might consist of nothing more than an area of the restaurant’s existing location(s) dedicated to fulfilling off-premises orders. Or it might apply to multi-unit chains who simply want to expand to new areas and don’t have the capital or inclination to deal with the burden of a full-service restaurant. Colombian chain Muy is one such company, having started as a dine-in restaurant before expanding its ghost kitchens to serve more areas of Latin America.

The most notable of all the companies in this category right now is Starbucks. In addition to building out “to-go” stores that exist solely for the purpose of fulfilling off-premises orders, the company has also partnered with Alibaba to turn parts of the latter’s Hema supermarkets into ghost kitchens in China.

The boundaries around this category are especially fluid. In other words, just because you operate your own ghost kitchen in one part of the country doesn’t mean you can’t team up with a third-party provider in another, as The Halal Guys and Chick-fil-A have done.

3. Virtual Restaurant Providers

This is where the lines really start to blur between restaurant, kitchen provider, and delivery company. Anyone can make a virtual restaurant, and as the category in our map shows, more than just restaurants are trying their hand at food concepts that can only be ordered through digital channels and are prepared in a ghost kitchen. Whole30, for example, is a diet concept better known for its cookbooks than its dealings with the restaurant industry. The folks behind that brand teamed up with Grubhub and restaurant company Lettuce Entertain You to create a virtual restaurant offering meals with Whole30-approved foods. 

On the other hand, a company like Keatz runs a network of virtual restaurants it houses beneath the roof of its own ghost kitchens. Taster, based out of France, creates native restaurant brands for food delivery companies like Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Food is cooked in Taster-run kitchens.

4. Mobile Kitchens

In slightly more its own category, companies like Ono Food Co. and Zume are creating robotic, self-contained kitchens on wheels that offer restaurant experiences that can be tailored to specific neighborhoods in a city and also plug into third-party delivery services.

Restaurants can also partner with these kitchens on wheels to expand their reach into new markets, as &Pizza has done by teaming up with Zume.

What’s Next for Ghost Kitchens

Ghost kitchens will become the norm for multi-unit chains. With off-premises orders expected to drive the majority of restaurant sales growth over the next decade, multi-unit brands (think Panera, Chipotle, etc.) will find ghost kitchens a cost-effective way to meet this demand without overburdening existing restaurants. The majority of them will rent space from kitchen infrastructure providers, as Chick-fil-A is currently doing with DoorDash. 

There will be an explosion of delivery-only brands. Since ghost kitchens provide a cheaper, faster way for food entrepreneurs and small restaurants alike to test-drive new concepts, we will see an influx of delivery- and pickup-only brands come out of these kitchens over the next year. Many will be born inside the walls of facilities like Kitchen United or CloudKitchens. Meanwhile, the number of virtual restaurant networks like that of Keatz will increase. 

Artificial Intelligence will be designed into the kitchen. AI is a really broad term that’s often misused. That fact aside, its presence in the restaurant industry is here to stay, and in ghost kitchens, it will prove itself valuable for everything from tracking ingredients to helping staff curb food waste. On the consumer end, we expect to see the technology more deeply integrated into the apps and websites from which customers order, improving recommendations and upselling opportunities.  

More non-restaurant food brands will launch virtual restaurants. In keeping with a trend recently made popular by Whole30 and Bon Apétit, food brands, diets, celebrity chefs, and other non-restaurant businesses will team up with third parties to launch delivery and pickup concepts. Grubhub and Uber Eats are two such third parties already doing this. Expect many more such partnerships — soon.

Bonus: The tech stack will get pared down. No front of house means no POS, right? Quite possibly. With less (or no) customer-facing technology like digital menu boards, self-order kiosks, and tabletop ordering, much of the restaurant tech on the market today becomes irrelevant in a ghost kitchen setting. As the folks at Reforming Retail noted recently, “under this scenario the POS is just an ordering node in the cloud that outputs your menu to a consumer and sends orders to your kitchen.”

That doesn’t mean restaurant tech is going by the wayside. Some ghost kitchens, like those of Muy, have a walkup option where customers order at kiosks onsite, and there will doubtless be new solutions created that are specifically for the ghost kitchen. But the tools of tomorrow’s ghost kitchen won’t look a thing like today’s bloated restaurant-management tech stack. For everyone involved, that’s a bonus.

Kroger Partners With Meal Delivery Service ClusterTruck to Launch Ghost Kitchen Operations

Kroger joins the growing list of non-restaurant food companies trying their hand at ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants. The grocery retailer announced today it has partnered with Indianapolis-based food delivery service ClusterTruck to launch multiple ghost kitchens that serve up delivery-only meals.

Through the partnership, ClusterTruck will sell its restaurant-quality meals via the Kroger Delivery Kitchen website. Customers can browse the service’s extensive menu, which covers considerably more food types and dietary preferences than many regular restaurants, place an order, and pay online, just as they would with any other food delivery service. From the looks of it, ClusterTruck has essentially taken its existing menu and placed it within the Kroger Delivery Kitchen shop, making it accessible to a wider number of potential customers.

That’s only one aspect of the partnership, though. As we wrote earlier this year, ClusterTruck, which has been operating virtual restaurants since 2015, controls the entire delivery stack of its business, from creating recipes and managing menus to building the software that powers the whole operation. It even employs its own fleet of drivers. The service will bring all of these elements to the new ghost kitchen operation with Kroger, who, as mentioned above, is basically just providing the virtual storefront.

The partnership will launch with four kitchens, one in each of the following cities: Carmel, Indiana; Indianapolis, Indiana; Columbus, Ohio; and Denver, Colorado.

Customers in delivery zones for Carmel, Indianapolis, and Columbus can now go to KrogerDeliveryKitchen.com to browse menus and place orders online. In Denver, where the operation is being handled by Kroger subsidiary King Scoopers, customers access the service through KingScoopersDelivery.com.

Whether Kroger and ClusterTruck will expand this operation to other U.S. cities remains to be seen. We have reached out to ClusterTruck and will update this post with more details as they arrive.

While the partnership is a high-profile one for a regional company like ClusterTruck, which is available mostly in the Midwest at this point, it’s also a smart move for Kroger. The concept of operating virtual restaurants out of ghost kitchens appeals nowadays to not just restaurants but also lifestyle brands, diet concepts, and celebrity chefs. Grocery stores were bound to follow at some point.

In fact, Kroger isn’t even the first supermarket chain to dabble in this area of the food industry. In China, Starbucks is operating ghost kitchens out of Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets as a way to fulfill more delivery orders. Expect more grocery store chains to follow with similar moves soon.

New Food Containers Promise to Keep French Fries Warm and Crispy

One easy way to ruin a relaxed takeout dinner at home are soggy french fries that lack a satisfying crunch when you eat them.

Novolex, a 16-year-old maker of packaging for the food, medical and building industries, hopes to prevent this food catastrophe with its new EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers, which it said in a press release keeps fried foods warm and crunchy. The containers do that with “micro-flute corrugation for superior rigidity and crush strength to maintain food integrity during transport and delivery.” Micro-flutes are the wavy paper in packaging that commonly protect all those items you order online.

“These containers even keep french fries crispy, warm and tasty,” said Adrianne Tipton, senior vice president of innovation at Novolex, in the release. “That’s a real innovation in food delivery.”

The company said the containers are designed for restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets, caterers and delivery services, and are made with a minimum of 33 percent post-consumer recycled content.

A request for more information from Novolex was not returned by press time, so we don’t know when these containers will be available and how much they cost compared to other containers.

Better food containers are much needed now, as delivery apps are becoming more popular, even spurring the creation of ghost restaurants, which exist solely to serve delivery customers. Bloomberg cited data by market-data firm App Annie that food delivery app downloads have increased 380 percent compared to three years ago. DoorDash leads the pack, with Grubhub and Uber Eats not too far behind.

Another company, aptly named Soggy Food Sucks, also offers a solution to the problem with a condensation absorbing patch that can stick to the food containers.

Hopefully, with these innovations in place, you’ll only have a bad feeling about fries when you eat too many of them.

Magazine-Turned-Food Brand Bon Appétit Partners With Grubhub for a Virtual Restaurant

Ghost kitchens are becoming such an important part of the food industry now that even non-restaurant food businesses are launching them.

Bon Appétit is the latest. Once just a glossy magazine full of food features and recipes, the publication has (wisely) kept up with the times by evolving into more of a food brand that includes a YouTube channel of instructional videos, a podcast, and live events. Now Bon Appétit has teamed up with Grubhub to open a virtual restaurant in Chicago.

Bon Appétit, Delivered launched yesterday as a delivery-only concept restaurant that features dishes from the brand’s magazine, website, podcast, Instagram feed, and other channels. Recipes for the meals are all developed by Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen editors in collaboration with the folks at Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group, who will run the virtual restaurant from its existing kitchens.

Like most other ghost kitchens, this one has no dining room and exists solely for the purpose of fulfilling delivery orders. The Bon Appétit Delivered menu is available exclusively to Chicago residents right now who order through Grubhub. Pricewise, Bon Appétit, Delivered is what you would expect from a gourmet food brand: main courses cost roughly between $17 and $23, with side dishes hovering around $7.

Bon Appétit, Delivered is actually the second time Grubhub and Lettuce Entertain You have collaborated on a ghost kitchen/virtual restaurant. In August, the delivery service launched a Chicago-based virtual restaurant with another non-restaurant food concept, the Whole30 brand, to deliver Chicago residents meals based on the Whole30 food program.

Both that concept and Bon Appétit, Delivered are, while creative, not that surprising. Because ghost kitchens don’t come with the high costs of maintaining a full-service restaurant with a front of house, they’re increasingly seen as a way to test out new concepts without incurring as much financial risk. And since ghost kitchens are largely delivery-only concepts, they can reach a larger audience faster than brick-and-mortar locations can.

With its latest collaborations, Grubhub is seemingly trying to create a new category of ghost kitchens with non-restaurant entities. The company hasn’t yet said if it will be expanding these concepts beyond Chicago, but whether in the Windy City or elsewhere, Whole30 and Bon Appétit are probably the first of many virtual restaurants to come from Grubhub.

Six Trends We Might See In Food Tech In 2018

News publications making predictions for the coming year is as much a holiday tradition as eggnog, mistletoe and avoiding awkward political fights at the dinner table. As we put 2017 to bed, let’s take a look at trends that we might see in food tech in 2018. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is filled with topics we returned to time and time again throughout the year.

1. Alterna-Products Will Get More Mainstream. With growing concerns over how meat and dairy impact our planet, there are a ton of alternative products coming to mass market:pea-based burger patties that “bleed,” plant-based shrimp, and coconut milk ice cream, to name just a few. And with investment from accelerators, the whole alterna-space is just going to get better and cheaper.

2. Virtual Restaurants Will Pop Up Everywhere (and Nowhere). Data driven food delivery services such as UberEATS have convinced some real world restaurants to open up virtual ones. These delivery only offshoots can experiment with new cuisines and menu items without the cost of adding additional square footage.

3. Meal Kit Shakeup. The prepared meal kit delivery market is going through an evolution as one of its pioneers, Blue Apron, had a rough year, and more focused services are blossoming around specific markets such as kids, or just sending proteins. Then there are hardware players like Nomiku and Tovala looking to bring their full stack food solutions that can be paired with sous vide machines or smart ovens into more houses. Oh, and then there is Amazon, which may make same day customizable meal kits a thing this year.

4. The Further Instagrammification of Food. The meals you eat can no longer just be tasty, they also have to pop off the plate to impress all your Instagram followers. As Restaurant Business points out, look for “rainbow colors, vertical deserts, smoking cocktails” to be on the menu next year.

5. Artificial Intelligence and Robots Rise Up for Real. Robots are already flipping burgers and now even your face can help you order (both at CaliBurger in Pasadena, FWIW). But robots and artificial intelligence will become more mainstream throughout the food stack next year. From agriculture to reducing food waste, and from food aisles to food delivery, the immediate future is about to get way more high-tech.

6. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. No company had a bigger impact on the food space this year than Amazon. It bought Whole Foods, giving the e-commerce giant an instant, nationwide, physical presence to better facilitate grocery delivery. It partnered with AllRecipes for shoppable grocery lists and launched an in-home delivery service. And, oh by the way, it just sold tens of millions of Alexa devices this past holiday to make ordering that much easier. But the interesting thing won’t be what existing markets Jeff Bezos and company will exert its influence over, but entirely new categories Amazon will create (visual recognition in your garden!).

What do you think will be the big stories in 2018? Leave us a comment and share your thoughts below.

When Is a Food Truck Not a Food Truck—But Something Better?

 ClusterTruck offers a visionary approach to food delivery, despite its somewhat misleading name. Located at the intersection of virtual restaurants, just-in-time ordering, home delivery and fleet management, the Indianapolis-based company recently has added Kansas City to its growing roster of markets served.

With ClusterTruck, it’s all about synchronization. Food, from an extensive menu, is prepared in a commissary-like kitchen in each of its now six locations. Orders, via a dedicated app or via the company website, are only offered within zones in each city where meals can be delivered to a customer’s curb within a reasonable time frame to ensure freshness. The twist, compared to other food delivery options, is that an individual order is not started until a driver can be located. For those who live outside a designated zone, a customer can place their food request and meet a driver within the delivery area.

“Having come from a deep technology background, we approached the growing problem of unsatisfied food delivery customers from a software perspective,” ClusterTruck Inc. CEO Chris Baggott, who co-founded digital marketing software company ExactTarget, said in a release. “We believe hungry people should never have to choose between the convenience of fast delivery, the food quality they’d get at a sit-down restaurant and the personality of street food, so we created a service that offers all of the above.”

Essential to ClusterTruck’s success is the specially designed kitchens where the food is prepared. Large digital displays cue chefs when to begin meal preparation, based on not only finding a driver but calculating the time it will take the vehicle to reach the meal prep location. According to company information, Baggott hand-coded the software to ensure accuracy for this crucial step.

Baggott also has his hands in the process far beyond prep and delivery. The ClusterTruck CEO owns a farm where animals used for much of the company’s menu are sourced, in a pasture-raised and antibiotic-free environment. With increasing demand, Baggott is contracting with other farms who are willing to raise their cows and pigs to ClusterTruck’s specifications.

ClusterTruck’s delivery fleet is made up of drivers who also may work for other services such as Uber, Lyft or Postmates. One of the company’s big selling points to recruit new drivers is that ClusterTruck provides only curbside delivery, all of which eliminates the hassle of parking, apartment building codes or elevators. Also, the company says it pays its drivers daily, rather than weekly or monthly, as is common with other food delivery services.

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The Latest Virtual Restaurants Dish Up Concepts That Would Make Mom Proud

Restaurant delivery service has steadily improved over the years, thanks to the likes of Seamless, Postmates, and UberEats. But it’s only been relatively recently that restaurants have begun to think of delivery as a primary business model, rather than an add-on service.

One such company is The Madera Group, who last week joined the virtual restaurant movement when it launched Modern Organics Mexican, otherwise known as M | O | M. The service is a cross between the Los Angeles-based company’s upscale Toca Madera restaurants and its fresh-casual counterpart, Tocaya Organica. More importantly, it’s a delivery-only restaurant specializing in high-quality, organic foods chosen because they, according to The Madera Group, “travel well.” Because nothing’s worse than ordering a burrito online and receiving a soupy mess falling out of its tortilla.

The service will be available from 5 p.m. to 12 a.m. for Angelinos, and will feature “homestyle” Mexican food sourced from organic ingredients. Delivery will be available via Postmates and UberEats.

Part of the inspiration for the service came from the huge success The Madera Group’s other restaurants have had with those third-party services. A service that catered to the delivery-only crowd seemed like the natural next step in the evolution of the brand. “M|O|M is an entirely new, delivery-only concept for us to bring more options for fresh, delicious and most of all, convenient Modern Organic Mexican to our customer’s doorsteps,” said Tosh Berman, CEO and Cofounder of The Madera Group. 

The virtual restaurant an increasingly popular trend, especially in big cities like LA, where real estate prices are surging and many mom-and-pop businesses have shuttered because they can’t afford the rent. Virtual restaurants that rely on “ghost kitchens” eliminate the challenge of paying for dining room space, outside parking, and other features we expect with sit-down restaurants.

UberEats, of course, has been a huge influence on restaurant operators moving to a delivery-only model, and will even help these establishments broaden their businesses. Take Chicago’s Si-Pie Pizzeria, for example. UberEats had been doing business with the restaurant for about a year when they approached owner Simon Mikhail and asked him to start offering fried chicken. Apparently, there was an unmet demand for the stuff in Mikhail’s neighborhood. Working with UberEats, he created the delivery-only Si’s Chicken Kitchen, which is available through the app and has no physical location. As of October, sales of fried chicken have already surpassed delivery sales for the original pizzeria.

Then there are companies like the Green Summit Group, whose main focus is providing delivery services out of its commissaries around New York and Chicago. The company works off an exclusive deal with Grubhub/Seamless. Talking to Fast Company earlier this year, founder Peter Schatzberg pointed out that one of the advantages of operating a virtual restaurant is the ease with which you can switch concepts. If, for example, Mediterranean food isn’t selling, try sushi instead. “That ability to maneuver and build new brands is exponentially easier on a cost basis,” he said.

Even corporate chains are jumping on board. Earlier in November, Red Robin, that staple of suburban shopping malls everywhere, started testing a delivery-only restaurant in downtown Chicago.

And those places are a tiny fraction of what’s now available to consumers. Seriously, there are probably enough virtual restaurants at this point to form a Zagat Guide category in many cities. And if a restaurant like M|O|M proves successful, healthy, quality ingredients could become the new standard for virtual restaurants. At the very least, M|O|M will ensure that when you choose “burrito” from the menu, something that actually resembles one will be what shows up at your door.