What’s Munch?
This blog started as a discovery into the rapidly growing food delivery industry. It’s become a broader look at the how tech is transforming the broader space of restaurants and food consumption as a whole. The emergence of ghost kitchens over the past few years presents broad opportunity to give restaurants global distribution, scale up food brands, and originate new ones. Such impacts prime the industry for innovative disruption to spread the best the world of food has to offer.
What’s a Ghost Kitchen?
Ghost kitchens are commercial cooking spaces that prepare food exclusively for delivery or takeout. These kitchens cater to users of digital delivery apps by servicing through online orders, often supporting multiple restaurant brands or menus from a single location. They leverage the rise of food apps and services to reach customers, optimizing kitchen operations for efficiency without the overhead of traditional restaurant settings. Ghost kitchens are reshaping the food industry by focusing on delivery-first dining experiences. There are a number of different models for ghost kitchens and they are also referred to as virtual kitchens, remote kitchens, and cloud kitchens.
What’s a Digital Restaurant Brand?
Digital Restaurant Brands are those that operate without a physical storefront. That’s to say that they have no brick-and-mortar locations but rather operate exclusively out of ghost kitchen spaces. These brands are often launched by digital brand companies that partner with existing restaurants or even content creators to launch menus on ghost kitchen networks. In other cases, they are launched by the ghost kitchen networks themselves to leverage their infrastructure. These brands can be distributed globally and are often run more like a software business than a restaurant. A single ghost kitchen often houses a number of such brands.
Who Am I?
My name is Alex Reznik. I’m a student at Dartmouth College who got interested in the food space talking to a local restaurant in San Carlos, California that launched as a ghost kitchen first business. After iterating as a delivery-only business, the restaurant expanded into physical storefronts. This conversation served as a signal that ghost kitchens and digital brands were offering new opportunities and business models in the food space and sparked my interest. I’m sharing my findings and interests in this developing industry through Munch. Thank you for reading.
