There's room to improve in the US, like making kitchens without the attached restaurant more prevalent, but as long as you have to get in a car to deliver the food, there's going to be the same problems the rideshare industry faces.
1) Ghost kitchens that only serve via delivery apps. You can save on rent by setting it up in an area with no foot-traffic. You can also get economies of scale.
2) Restaurants with dedicated entrances for delivery drivers. Baar Baar in NYC has a separate place where delivery workers can wait. In other restaurants, they have to wait in the limited dining area. One hopes that the workers still get to use restrooms & get some water, etc.
You can't. This is the kind of a mistake that all first time entrepreneurs make. Delivery costs too much money. Logistics of getting your labor force to your kitchen is a nightmare.
> 2) Restaurants with dedicated entrances for delivery drivers. Baar Baar in NYC has a separate place where delivery workers can wait. In other restaurants, they have to wait in the limited dining area. One hopes that the workers still get to use restrooms & get some water, etc.
This was tried in NYC during first dot com. Remember purple shirts? They had a competitor with green shirts. That's the unproductive spaces. Rent hikes wiped those out.
Edit: Blind downvotes are laughable. Go walk into your local pizza place and talk to the owners. They will tell you why they are slowly dropping off all the apps. They are giving equivalent of a 20-30% discount in fees for the area they already deliver in.
Ghost kitchens are mostly scams. The ones that aren't are ran out of commissary commercial kitchens that cost an arm and a leg. The "ghost kitchens" are mostly not really legal, sometimes ran out of a house, marketing same stuff under different names. Most of the restaurant overhead for small places does not come from the rent of the floor space. It comes from the rent of the kitchen and compliance with the health codes. And, unlike say taxi commissions, health departments take no crap, which is why the ghost restaurants disappear rather quickly.
It is the "no one did it before" idea of people who have never ran restaurants. It always flops. If it did not, Union Sq Hospitality would have been doing it for years.
Your commission is also a bit off, perhaps you speak from full service experience?
While true that base comm is 20-30, those numbers are always negotiated down. Grub/Seamless will take as low as 12 from high vol regional leaders while UberEats made some deals that are supposedly really low (McDonalds). I don’t have exact numbers but from my recollection they mentioned it in their S1.
While Danny Myers is quite smart, USH isn’t a barometer for the entire industry as his focus is more on full service.
They are not. They are just a different model than a standard restaurant.
What I have observed in my area (UK) is that instead of expanding by setting up a new branch in the costly centre of town, some chains work with Deliveroo to open a ghost kitchen in the industrial area.
That allows them to expand to a new town while saving on capex.
Surely by selecting a location that balances low rent versus proximity to residential areas you could lower operational costs while still ensuring staff could get to work and keep delivery costs low? I get that running a restaurant is a complex and risky business, but i dont think youve really addressed why a delivery only kitchen would fail consistently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Neither Shanghai or Beijing would make top 20 on this list
Chinese cities have access to incredibly cheap labor, far more so than most cities in the US or Europe.
