Nimbus has always been careful to set itself apart from ghost kitchens, even though it looks very much like one from the outside.
The New York City-based company owns large facilities housing multiple commercial kitchens that it rents out for short- and long-term use. About 20% of its tenants are restaurants that use the kitchens as delivery hubs, said founder and CEO Camilla Opperman Morse. So there is at least a bit of ghost kitchen in Nimbus’ DNA.
But the majority of its space is occupied by caterers, bakers, packaged goods companies and other food producers that are not necessarily cooking for immediate consumption. Nimbus even hosts a kitchen robotics startup that uses the space as a lab.
“We do provide the infrastructure for direct-to-consumer delivery,” Opperman Morse said, “but we are so much more than that.”
That flexibility is one reason Nimbus has succeeded where ghost kitchens have failed, and in a very literal sense: Three of Nimbus’ soon-to-be five locations were once used by Kitchen United, the onetime ghost kitchen provider that closed its physical plants late last year and is pivoting to software.
Ghost kitchens exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid the rise of delivery and demand for contactless dining. They were viewed as ways for restaurants to meet that demand and also enter new markets at a lower cost. Ghost kitchens were virtually turnkey, offering the space, technology and marketing support needed to run a delivery-only restaurant. Truckloads of financing and rapid expansion soon followed. But many of those businesses have since collapsed or transformed into something else.
Though Nimbus emerged around the same time, and has often been lumped under the ghost kitchen label, it has always been strictly a kitchen provider rather than a restaurant or technology business, Opperman Morse said. It refers to itself as a “co-cooking” company.
Camilla Opperman Morse. | Photo courtesy of Nimbus
In 2019, Opperman Morse was 25 and working in supply chain operations. But she had fond memories of operating a campus snack shack for three years in college and was ready to start a food company of her own. The problem was, she couldn’t find anywhere to cook.
“There was a complete dearth of viable solutions here in New York City,” she said. “I realized that there was just this huge white space for food businesses looking to launch or grow their concepts.”
That gave her the idea for Nimbus, a company that would provide food businesses with easy access to commercial kitchens. It signed its first lease in January 2020 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Nimbus’ narrow focus on kitchen infrastructure is another reason Opperman Morse believes it has been able to outlast many ghost kitchens, which tend to be multilayered and more complex to operate.
“We’ve seen a lot of ghost kitchen players really vertically integrate, quite prematurely, in my opinion,” she said. In addition to kitchen space, many have their own in-house software and restaurant brands. “At the end of the day, those are three very disparate business models.”
Nimbus, meanwhile, has found a niche in the less glamorous parts of running a kitchen, like cleaning, pest control and trash removal. Early on, it tried to develop its own booking and billing app, but found that it distracted from those day-to-day tasks. “We came to the conclusion, ‘Why try to reinvent the wheel?’” Opperman Morse said.
Before Nimbus' Chicago location was a Kitchen United, it housed a culinary school. | Photo courtesy of Nimbus
Nimbus makes money in four ways: On-demand hourly kitchen rentals; annual rentals; dry, cold and frozen storage space rentals; and events space rentals. Businesses can use the events space in each of Nimbus’ locations to engage with their customers face to face.
So far, the business model has proven effective. Each of Nimbus’ four New York locations is profitable, and three of them are full. On May 1, the company will open its first facility outside of the Big Apple, in Chicago, where Opperman Morse said there’s already been “incredible demand.”
The 19,000-square-foot facility in Chicago's River North neighborhood has 17 units ranging in size from 400 to 1,600 square fee, an events space and dry, cold and frozen storage areas. Before it was a Kitchen United, it was a culinary school.
By 2030, Nimbus believes it can be in every major city in the country. Defunct ghost kitchens could help pave the way.
“Certainly there’s been a proliferation of additional facilities coming into the mix,” Opperman Morse said. “We really see an opportunity to roll up these existing assets and layer on the Nimbus operating platform and grow that way.”
Taking over three vacant Kitchen United properties has allowed Nimbus to double its footprint in a matter of months, and at a much lower cost than it would require to build kitchens from scratch, as Nimbus did at its first two locations.
And there are more than 1,000 shared kitchens in the U.S., Opperman Morse said, providing plenty of runway for Nimbus to grow. That said, Nimbus wants to be measured about its expansion, prioritizing profits and operational excellence over speed.
“You can’t deploy 100 kitchen facilities across the country overnight the way that you can deploy a line of code into your SaaS platform,” she said.