Tech Check is a regular column on restaurant technology by Senior Editor Joe Guszkowski. It's also a newsletter.
In honor of the start of Halloween season, I thought I’d write about a topic that has been brewing in restaurant circles for a while now: The need to exorcize “ghost kitchen” from our industry’s vocabulary.
It was a clever, catchy title for a new kind of restaurant that emerged around 2018 or 2019—one that existed only online and only for delivery, with no storefront or dining room to speak of. Like ghosts, these restaurants were both there and not there at the same time. And with the rapid rise of food delivery, they seemed ready to explode.
A lot has changed since then. Companies that once acted like ghost kitchens have evolved into something more closely resembling food halls. And other concepts have cropped up that were not ghost kitchens to begin with, but got lumped in with them anyway. The number of operations that actually fit the definition of ghost kitchen seems to be shrinking, and yet the term still dominates the conversation around upstart, off-premise-centric restaurants.
That’s why I am officially nominating the phrase for retirement, or, at the very least, a reduced workload in restaurant discourse. Yes, it is just a label, and labels can be useful. But this one tends to obscure what we’re actually talking about.
The first appearance of “ghost kitchen” in this publication was almost exactly five years ago, in a story about Kitchen United. The company started as a textbook ghost kitchen: It ran facilities that were divided into dozens of small kitchens that restaurants could rent out as delivery outlets.
But Kitchen United, like many of its ghost kitchen counterparts, has changed quite a bit since then. It has learned, for instance, that it’s very difficult to survive on delivery sales alone. It has also learned that having storefronts and prime real estate helps attract customers. Most of its locations are now either in Kroger grocery stores or other highly trafficked areas. As a result, it now does more pickup than delivery, and a significant portion of its sales are from walk-ins. “Ghost kitchen” just doesn’t fit the bill.
“It’s not reflective of what we do,” CEO Atul Sood said in a recent interview. “If you walk into a Kroger, you see a physical store.”
Other companies that were part of the initial ghost kitchen wave have taken a similar path. Reef Kitchens, for instance, has shifted from operating delivery-only food trailers to “virtual food halls” where customers can order from a variety of restaurants and grab their food from pickup lockers.
The virtual food hall model has been adopted by others, like Local Kitchens and Wonder, which offer delivery, pickup and in-person ordering and even have places for guests to sit down and eat. Local Kitchens calls its stores “micro food halls,” while Wonder’s have been dubbed “a new kind of food hall.”
While ghost kitchens began to look more like regular restaurants, a funny thing was happening at regular restaurants. They were shrinking their dining rooms or getting rid of them altogether in favor of takeout-only locations that operated a lot like ghost kitchens, except it seemed crazy to call them that. Somewhere in the midst of that, the term started to lose meaning.
Today, there are really only a few true ghost kitchens left, at least in the U.S. CloudKitchens is one of them, and it’s not exactly thriving. Another is ClusterTruck, a small chain of delivery-only restaurants out of Indiana that has had success with a vertically integrated delivery model.
So if we are to lay “ghost kitchen” to rest, what do we call this new breed of high-tech, multibrand, omnichannel restaurants?
“Virtual food halls” isn’t bad. It gets at the wide selection and the emphasis on technology, but doesn’t totally rule out the option for an in-person experience.
I’m also a fan of “delivery-service restaurants,” which is the preferred nomenclature of Dublin-based Hosted Kitchens. It’s self-explanatory and fits easily within our existing taxonomy: limited service, full service, delivery service. And it erases the creepy connotations that come with “ghost.”
Or maybe we just cut to the chase and group them under limited service or QSR, which is probably their closest restaurant relative.
Ultimately, it will be impossible to come up with a name that captures every concept, which is a reflection of just how much the pandemic and its aftermath have blurred the lines between restaurant segments. It’s a sign that the industry is experimenting, innovating and evolving—sometimes faster than we can find words to describe it. And that’s not a bad thing.