(1/3) The Future of Food Service: Navigating the Shift to Digital Restaurants
From Web Directories to Delivery Apps
The restaurant industry is undergoing a digital transformation reshaping the landscape of food delivery. Transition from discoverability enhancement via the internet to integrating orderability with platforms like DoorDash and UberEats has progressively changed the way restaurants operate and interact with customers. Now, the advent of ghost kitchens ushers in a new era, the "scalability act," promising to redefine the essence of what it means to be a restaurant in the digital age by divorcing the culinary process from traditional restaurant spaces and expanding the potential for innovation and growth within the industry.
During the “discoverability act” in the late nineties, the internet served only as a remote directory. When visiting a new city, a traveler could Google “restaurants in Kyoto” and have a directory webpage pop up with nearby options. The “orderability act” arrived in the following decade. Brought on by companies such as Doordash, UberEats, and the like, this second phase serviced online discovery, ordering, and delivery to consumer’s doors. Delivery platforms moved down the chain from restaurant discovery to individual food delivery. Though orderability marked progress, delivery still represented an external interaction with a restaurant - the workings of the kitchen remained the same.
Restaurants have serviced takeout for over a century. All that’s changed is where these take-out orders are coming from and who’s picking them up. Rather than calling in, diners click check-out on a delivery app. Rather than getting picked up by the ultimate consumer, take-out orders are picked up by a driver. Products such as OrderMark aggregate tickets from different delivery apps into one system anyways, so the internal workings of the kitchen hardly change at all. A ticket comes in, the order is cooked, and it's sent out to the customer whether they are in a booth or sitting at home on their couch.
Restaurant digitization’s third act, however, is creating a structural change in the restaurant industry that will do for food much of what the internet did for information. The “scalability act” redefines what it means to be a “restaurant”. With the establishment of ghost kitchen networks, a restaurant is no longer tied to the replication of its food, but instead only its creation.
Creation is the act of producing the recipe for an item - the act of coming up with something new. It’s the process of developing food. Replication is the procedure of cooking that item over and over to serve customer orders. The goal is the opposite of creation: It’s not to create something new, but rather to create something as close as possible to the menu’s listed item. A good creation is most different. A good replication is most same.
Ghost kitchens take care of the replication as an analogue to how Content Delivery Networks (CDN) handle web distribution. When a company deploys a website to the internet, the “recipe” for serving the site is uploaded to the CDN’s network of servers. Whenever a user types in the website’s address - in effect “ordering” its “delivery” - the network server closest to that user replicates the page based on the downloaded recipe to deliver said website to the user.
Made up of hundreds of kitchens spread out around the world, Ghost Kitchen Networks (GKN) operate equivalently. A restaurant who wants to serve on the network uploads their “recipe” - their creation. When a user orders on a delivery-app, the ghost kitchen nearest the customer cooks up the order from the instruction set and hands it off for delivery. CDN’s send internet packets. GKN’s send DoorDash packets.
Ghost kitchens remove the means of production from the restaurant. They detach the kitchen replication process. So too, restaurant’s are provided with an effective global scale. Ghost kitchen brands like Kitopi, the five year old juggernaut out of Dubai, operates hundreds of kitchens spanning a dozen cities. Each of these kitchens services three thousand daily orders, providing any given restaurant with a hypothetical capacity of a million orders a day - instantly. To deploy a restaurant into the kitchen network requires two weeks. It often takes longer to launch a website.