What is the purpose of a ghost kitchen?

A ghost kitchen, also known as a dark kitchen, virtual kitchen, shade kitchen or police station kitchen, is a food preparation facility that prepares meals for home orders. You can think of a ghost kitchen as a restaurant with no dining seats or a commercial kitchen optimized to fulfill home orders. In short, ghost kitchens are physical spaces for operators to create food for consumption outside the facility. And in apps like Grubhub and DoorDash, listings of restaurants that operate with ghost kitchens don't usually look different from traditional establishments.

For example, where I live in Northern Colorado, there's a restaurant called Rocco's Ravioli that appears on apps. But Rocco's doesn't have a shop window. It's a food delivery service that makes food in a ghost kitchen. In a ghost kitchen, you are cooking in a kitchen with optimized delivery and designed to reduce unnecessary costs.

The rent is low and the efficiency is high. You have your own private commercial kitchen space inside a delivery center to prepare orders. It can be difficult to expand your traditional restaurant with high overhead costs. However, since ghost kitchens act as satellite kitchens from their main base of operations, they can easily expand from coast to coast with little capital.

Food costs represent another part of your income, but ghost kitchens usually focus on a niche or a limited menu. Even national chains such as Chili's and Applebee's used ghost kitchens to maintain cash flow and try new menu dishes with different brands in case the ideas failed. So, if a national restaurant chain doesn't want to enter the ghost kitchen market, there's no reason why it can't rent its space to another chef who does. Ghost kitchen facilities can offer different types of food under one roof, satisfying the consumer's appetite for a convenient variety.

Ghost kitchens helped traditional restaurants recover their losses and minimize employee layoffs by allowing them to prepare food for several brands and stay in business. Big companies, such as Panera Bread, use ghost kitchens to test new concepts, as they recognize that the next step in food is technology-driven. Physical stores can also use apps, but ghost kitchens don't rely on foot traffic to sell. A ghost kitchen is where virtual restaurants produce food without a physical store to call home.

In short, a ghost kitchen provides you with an opportunity to build a successful restaurant concept and get back to normal. Ghost kitchens are here to stay, and with these five benefits, it can be hard not to get in on the action. All of this has only made ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants even more of the culinary spotlight, making sure that they are here to stay. However, ghost kitchens may not prepare culinary delights from a virtual restaurant brand, but rather support several restaurant operations under one roof.