Companies like Unilever have been doing this for far longer than anyone in the restaurant space. Churn out thousands of brands that supposedly "compete" with each other in the marketplace. If one of those brands has a reputation problem, shut it down and replace it. Rinse and repeat.
If the practice is distasteful, then change the law, but beware the lobbyists.
There is couple of fundamental difference to Unilever example:
1. Similar sounding names to existing brand is trademark infringement. Here this particular entity is deliberately copying the restaurant names to mislead people into selecting them (when original restaurants are closed).
2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.). Here obviously that is not the case.
It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.
Reputation is a core concept in building trust in human relations, that we have subconsciously transferred to brands.
Since the dawn of time, both humans and brands are trying to fake their reputation. For instance in the old days, when communication wasn't as fast, con artists used to travel a lot, allowing them to start over after ruining their reputation.
I think for many of us it gives an innate sense of disgust because it goes agains the core of human relationships.
I agree with the parent, there is a lot of similarity here. You may be right that cloud kitchens are more haphazard and veer into challengeable trademark infringement. Old giants like Unilever tend to be better at legal precision.
Besides that, they're both doing the same thing. They're using brands to obfuscate, artificially manage reputation, or achieve basic marketing goals... not tell consumers who they are buying from. It's all deceptive. Fake choice, fake competition, fake diversity. It's all abusive of trademarks. Trademarks are intended to help consumers know what they're buying, create some reputational accountability. Typical FMCG strategies, like unilever and these cloud kitchens, are all about neutralising this... allow them to enjoy positive reputation while neutralising the negative reputation.
All of this is standard strategy, used often. For example. You are going for a "normal" supermarket experience: Many options for cereal, cheese, detergent, etc. Choice. But, you still want 70% cereal market share to go to vendor A. Maybe it's an internal vendor. So, fake branding. Fake diversity. Create the experience without creating the experience.
As Cloud restaurants become a mature, they'll probably learn to avoid legal trouble. But, the game will still be the game. It's not cheating if you're drunk.
The post, for example, wants to know which brands represent which kitchens. He doesn't want food from the bad kitchens. Tightening up trademark infringement will not help him.
Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?
>2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.). Here obviously that is not the case.
> Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards...
Where did this assumption come from? That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware. Do you honestly believe they only make different brands because they are testing how the sound of the brands name affects sales? Nothing around compartmentalizing the risk of them causing some backlash by cutting corners or getting people ill, and the ability to just cut off that one brand rather than their entire product line?
>It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.
It is literally the opposite to me. It feels like deception is the main goal unless they make the "Product of X Conglomerate" a larger part of the packaging than the brands label, and not the minimum size required by law, or if its legally allowed, omitted entirely from the label
They absolutely don’t. Given brand of laundry detergents can be quite different between neighboring Poland and Germany, with the only visible difference being the set of languages on the label.
The cloud kitchen model is more akin to putting lipstick on pigs...
I hardly ever eat out because the cost and hassle compared to the food is far, far from being a reasonable trade to me. On a daily basis, I don't want "fancy" plates of food creations, just simple but fresh and relatively healthy food like I would (or, rather, do) make for myself.
However, having a kitchen churning out fresh food, a bit like a canteen but with a delivery step (doesn't have to be direct, a "round" would work too as long as the food stays approximately fresh and arrives within a reasonable slot).
There's no need for this to happen in a restaurant with tables and tills. The most efficient system is probably a big central kitchen and a bunch of electric delivery vehicles. The economies of scale that such an operation could bring over me buying a few portions at a time, slicing single cucumbers and heating my little oven or pans to cook a few items day in day out seem like they could plausibly be favourable to outweigh the downsides (cost of delivery, lack of control over the food ingredients, quality, portion size etc).
Of course such a system, if it became dominant over others would probably very quickly fall victim to MBA syndrome as corners are cut and it ends up being school/prison slop (with a much much more expensive premium option that is basically what we already have).
And I imagine people don't like the idea of a "remote canteen" vs the romantic idea of a chef lovingly assembling a dish and carefully handing it to a courier.
So my options are to do it myself or pay multiples.
But that's all not an excuse to hide behind a fleet of faux-boutique identities. When you do that it's borderline scam. Or not borderline at all, once you accept that most of the money we spend on getting food cooked for is not about the calories and not even about the taste.
As far as industries go, the restaurant industry is probably one of the least consolidated in the world. For every chain restaurant, there are a dozen standalone restaurants.
In the US that type of setup is pretty much illegal everywhere. Chains were becoming more prevalent, but recently we’ve basically gone back to the same model with a food truck, which is tiny and takes up a parking spot. Usually taking off the wheels is illegal though.
Many products already do it eg “TheThing: By TheParentCompany”. But yes maybe consumers should be aware who ultimately benefits from their purchase of a product, and easily be able to decide to buy more independent brands.
How do you define "ultimate parent owner of the company"? In the case of Unilever, they own the brands directly, so it's straightforward to determine the "ultimate parent owner". But it's not hard to register a separate LLC for each brand, which makes the "ultimate parent owner" much murkier, especially if the LLC has weird ownership structures.
this got me thinking - the photos of the store fronts are basically garages, with few or no tables and chairs, and few or no delivery vehicles. you'd expect in a massive city with 24/7 food services, and a large surface area to nab unsuspecting customers, there to be a fleet of mopeds awaiting outside. but instead the address given is probably just where the businesses are registered. box ticked, nothing checked. the actual "kitchen" and delivery mechanism could be based anywhere. e.g. the nearest/dirtiest friend/family/gang member to the delivery address. are we to trust that the one running this scam adheres to food safety standards? or any standards for that matter
Lobby to change the law but beware lobbying?
lobbyist: A person who is paid to lobby politicians and encourage them to vote a certain way or otherwise use their office to effect a desired result.
Emphasis on paid.
Or, you know, use morals and conscience.
This is the same reason why murder us illegal even though most people wouldn't do it anyways.
The branding of the parent entity must be more prominent than any subbrand on any packaging or promotional material.
This applies to pretty much all areas of life:
Food delivery, Web scraping, personal relationships, insider trading, nation building, you name it.
Also intent/appearance of sincerity matters: "When Two Do The Same Thing, It Is Not The Same Thing After All."
A few years ago I was ordering a fair amount off Postmates. One night I ordered something that was decently expensive. When it came the food looked nothing like the picture and was so bad it was borderline inedible. I threw it away in disbelief that a restaurant could possibly be this bad and after a bit of research I discovered that this wasn’t a ‘real’ restaurant - it’s one of these converted buildings that operate on a delivery only basis through the apps.
I tried to complain to Postmates but they ignored me, gave me copy/paste e-mail responses and didn’t do anything.
So I never used Postmates again, and likely never will. A lot of these businesses are run to try to make quick profits at the expense of establishing long-term trust and they will ultimately fail.
This makes me think anyone running a cloud kitchen is going to always be under the thumb of the apps/landlord with no way to expand revenue.
Maybe this is why the owner of these restaurants has so many brands. Back when phone books were a thing, you'd see businesses named "AAA Bail Bonds" or "AAA Plumbing" [0] so they would sort first in their classification. Looking at the restaurant names they used, it appears that they want at least one of their brands to appear in every cuisine category - so no matter if you're searching for Biryani, Chinese, Curry, or Kebabs, they'll have a presence on Swiggy & Zomato.
A restaurant that specializes in every possible kind of cuisine isn't likely to be good at any of them, and it appears their ratings bear that out. :)
[0] A plot point in the The Accountant movie with Ben Affleck was that he had named his business "ZZZ Accounting" so that he wouldn't get many walk-in customers.
I Made My Shed the Top-Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor - https://www.vice.com/en/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-to...
Uber hasn’t monoplized marketing.
My online ordering habits are wedded to the restaurant not the middleman. (Unlike taxi trips where I am loyal to Uber not the driver).
If a restaurant gives you a shit or good meal it is a good prediction model for your experience the next time. You can’t actually commoditize Pizza as much as you would intuitively imagine.
A blind Pizza from Uber? No thanks. Pizza from XYZ Pizza who I trust via the Uber conduit. Yes please! Via the XYZ Pizza app and save $5. Hell yes!
Its the same as yahoo/altavista/google.
So why would you trust any random person that makes an Uber driver account to drive you around, but not do the same for restaurants?
EDIT: OK this explains a lot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32615712
As per the EDIT yes one of my two brothers is a professional chef, I also completed a short course to be accredited as a food safety officer/supervisor (a requirement to run even a short term food business), spoke with Uber Eats about the onboarding process, discussed our brand/food options together, found a location in a pocket we thought would do well for that cuisine etc.
If this is of interest perhaps I can put a few little things together.
Even if you skip it, it’s pretty low risk in short term, just dont make anyone sick/complain!
But there are also commercial kitchen spaces you can rent. They've taken care of the inspections and permits for the food preparation facilities. You pay an hourly rate to use the facilities. Then all you have to do is make sure that your employees have their food handler's permits (a simple matter) and you're good to go.
Perhaps it makes financial sense for an existing (non-ghost) restaurants. They can expand their revenue, keep their kitchen busy, etc. So anyone from your local mom n' pop burger place to big chains (IHOP, Applebee's, etc) can run several ghost kitchen brands to increase kitchen utilization.
I’d love to hear; why you did it, The pros and cons, the effort vs reward.
I had thought about doing something similar for African food in my area as there is no African food on any of the apps
To people who don't know, part of the core of Costco's business model is curation, which leads to customer trust. I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. I know that anything with a kirkland brand on it is going to be so high quality and so cheap that it feels like I found a cheat.
What's funny about costco is that their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence. Yeah they have a website, but it doesn't seem to actually have a comprehensive list of everything they sell. You have to go to the store and check out what they have (and get a hot dog or a piece of pizza while you're there)
If there was a delivery app that curated restaurants, I would absolutely love it, and I also think it would be really successful.
"Caviar’s platform architecture created value by focusing on a niche market that would drive a critical mass of users with only a few restaurants, allow for exclusivity to reduce multi-homing, and provide ancillary services for restaurants to reduce the barriers to entering the delivery business.
Caviar launched with a relatively limited, curated assortment of restaurants that had loyal customer bases among food enthusiasts. With only 30 restaurants, Caviar had a small selection compared to its competitors, offering around one vendor per cuisine. Despite this, Caviar’s value proposition of “hype” restaurants attracted a different customer base that were willing to pay a premium to get delivery from these crave-able restaurants, many of which had never been available before on delivery. In addition, by onboarding restaurants new to delivery onto its platform, Caviar was able to sign exclusivity with many of its partners to reduce the multi-homing and creating stronger network effects with its users."[1]
[1] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/caviar-foo...
KOSMO.com
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Back in ~1999 there was a site called KOSMO.com, and, in San Francisco it was basically "doordash" and sought to employ a ton of urban bicycle delivery folks. I bought my first on-line delivery from KOSMO and it was delivered to me by bike messenger within an hour. That thing was the movie DVD "RAN" by Kirosawa....
so shorlty after this, I was on a flight back east and was talking with a guy sitting next to me, and we were talking about KOSMO, and I said to him "You know what would be great, would be a heat-map of restaraunts that are within my radi of travel modes (like whats within a five minute walk and is indian food"
I described this whole model I wanted from these new ways to deliver, order, pay....
Turned out the guy sitting next to me was one of the founders of KOSMO.com.....
--
They went under pretty quick and never developed tech for "whats near me now", so that sucks.
and to this day, with maps.FAANG everything and online order/delivery service Unicorns, I still dont have the perfect "map of shit thats near me as a heat map, based on what I am looking for and my mode of either transport/delivery"
Maps are really good, but they are still simply "maps"
I'd like a 'sentiment' layer on top of maps.
---
An example would be:
Show me the neighborhood [indian/mexican/whatever] restaurant, but show me traffic to and from, based on the radius of its customer-base
So basically you can see how many people are flocking to a place.
It was awesome to order a single 20oz bottle of coke from them. Sadly they stared a minimum order soon after.
It’s koZmo with a Z btw. Unless we are thinking of different dot.com busts…
This has been tried many times and is basically illegal now so you will never have it. It always gets litigated for racism and shuts down. The best you will ever get is busy/not busy.
Its also the same reason google will never direct you away from a very unsafe area in an unfamiliar place.
Its the same reason no real estate site provides a crime stat overview.
The Costco Grocery component of their website is actually pretty impressive. Quick shipping times and decent prices.
Ordering non-grocery from the website still has a long lead time before the item actually ships.
A couple of tangents:
1. I have ordered things from the Costco website; one time it was a large TV that was cheaper there than anywhere else I could find it, most recently a couple of office chairs. Their web purchasing experience is similar to others I have used.
2. There seems to be some evidence that Costco may be perpetrating animal cruelty on a pretty big scale: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/06/23/costco-chicke...
This is my experience with IKEA. Trying to have furniture bought and shipped was so painful and expensive that it was like they didn’t want to be bothered.
I bought a set that was too big for my SUV. $2300. Still wanted $150 delivery, two week notice, and it was ultimately fulfilled by some mom and pop service.
It was like IKEA decided, “we have one prescribed user experience but if you want us to find you a guy with a van to do the pickup for you, we don’t mind.”
sorry couldn't help myself...
Costco online is a different story though. They sell stuff like laser hair regrowth helmets and magnetic healing pads.
I usually go for gas, since its cheaper. There's always a long lineup, 10 minutes or so. Then I go to find a parking space - which I usually try to cut short by parking far away, but costco lots around me are fairly small for the amount of business going on in the store and crowded.
Every second in the store is torture. A mass of people who are all trying to get to wherever they're going. I dont' care about the little food tasting stations - the food sucks and I don't care about it. Items that were there the week before are suddenly no longer stocked at all, and finding boxes is pretty hit or miss. Some items don't have UPCs even though its required to get through self checkout, so self checkout is sabotaged by their own packaging. The mass of people are constantly in the way.
The best part of costco is getting a hotdog on the way out, but in the last 5 times I've gone the wait for a cheap hot dog was ~15 minutes.
I end up going for cheap gas and wasting an hour in line or trying to get to the few items I want to buy.
If this is a so good store experience I have no idea where you normally shop. Every second of it is torture. Maybe if they had half the people in the store, it would be painful instead of unbearable, but thats not a thing.
I don't really understand why people think its a good experience. It's like shopping elsewhere but with even more people around you and trying to get to the things you're standing in front of while you try to make decisions on what to buy, and longer lines.
I don't know that I have a trust level with costco at all. they're just a store.
Sounds like you're still going? That is very confusing reading your write up with multiple complaints and how there are better alternatives and nobody has time to wait to save a bit on gas.
Can even have a better experience by not renewing the membership.
Also, you can order random thinks like TVs or a tent via Ubereats. Fellow humans, I think we are at the peak of Capitalism.
Consumerist.
Also, on all of these delivery services I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option. I want to support local businesses — actual restaurants. It's annoying having to research any new place I want to try to make sure it's not operated out of the back side of some warehouse.
(Also: "Curate," don't aggregate. It's a little more expensive and requires actual knowledge, which is why no one wants to do it. But then you actually become a service people can trust.)
The model has been tainted by larger chains (e.g. Chili's, Chuck E. Cheeze) notoriously branding multiple menus to look like indie places for online orders, and bigger quick-serve franchises (e.g. McDonalds) doing standalone delivery-only build-outs in cheaper neighborhoods that could probably benefit from an actual restaurant, but instead just get the traffic and smells. It's too bad because I think the ghost kitchen tenant model is a clever way to share resources for folks just starting out.
Here's one I got a bunch of ads for when they first opened up and I lived nearby.
I respect that operating out of a warehouse might be a way to break into the restaurant business, but it’s also a way to suck money away from more valuable institutions. And I don’t really have the energy to figure out which it is. (And I have had enough shitty experiences with cloud kitchens that frankly I want to avoid all of them.)
Around here if you want to pilot a restaurant idea you get a food truck.
The only caveat I’ve found is that sometimes places that are too far away are available for pick up but don’t deliver that far.
I think fundamentally the concept just doesn't attract the right kind of business owners. To open a restaurant of your own you must, on some level I assume, be interested in cooking or cuisine. Cloud kitchens as a concept seemed like they were marketed more to investor/vc types as a vertical to invest in. Typically this group would have gravitated towards franchise ownership where some other corporate entity has figure out the "food" part of the equation. It may not be the most healthy or even the best but they take care of making something palatable and most importantly consistent.
Translation: Some anonymous people that know more about spreadsheets than cooking decided to open a business in my town. They realized that making decent food is a slow and expensive way to build a brand recognition, so they entered into a licensing agreement with Guy Fieri instead.
FYI if you see a Sysco brand truck at a restaurant it means you should never eat there, just go to mcdonalds as its the same quality.
Me too. I'm simply allergic to the whole idea of it. I've actually stopped using online food delivery services to avoid it, and have gone back to just calling the restaurants directly and picking the food up myself.
Do you have a freezer and a microwave? Then you, too can become a restaurant owner - just download our app and register! Once you signed up, we'll send you a week's supply of frozen meals from our selection. You can accept orders from our app, simply reheat one item, repackage it, wait for our delivery specialist to arrive and you're good to go! For a modest 30% fee we'll take care of all the rest!
McDonald's cooks its quarter pounders from fresh beef (hasn't been frozen since 2018). Their Roma tomatoes are also, you know, fresh. Just like their lettuce. Their Egg McMuffins are cracked from fresh eggs onto the griddle.
They deep-fry their fries, good luck doing that at home in your microwave.
All their sandwiches are hand-assembled. Buns and english muffins all freshly toasted.
McDonald's is an actual restaurant. They're not just reheating and repackaging. Unless by your standard every restaurant falls under this category...?
The whole model only works because the end users don't know they are ordering reheated microwave crap. It's deception, nothing else.
McDonald's and other franchisers at least still offer a physical restaurant and food items you wouldn't be able to prepare at home in that quality.
You'll get these websites that whole pages consisting of nothing but text stating:
Carpet Cleaning Mount Waverley
Carpet Cleaning Glen Waverley
Carpet Cleaning Notting Hill
Carpet Cleaning Clayton
(Repeat for every suburb in Melbourne...)
etc. etc.
All of them actively seem like scams, give wildly varying quotes and frustrate you to the point where you just don't book the service at all.
Absolute parasites.
Might I disagree.
They are vandals.
A parasite is an organism that survives by extracting from others. These are bots or bots designed by mindless individuals and set loose to do harm. They deserve even less respect than computer viruses that at least mimic proto-lifeforms. There is no "it" to have a survival agenda here.
Having done with "Harms", as I research the "Motives" chapter of Ethics for Hackers I've taken an unexpected dive into criminology and now see a blind-spot in the entrepreneurial, late-capitalist mind-set of the "Silicon Valley" hacker space. There's a tendency to see everything through a rather narrow lens of financial motives. Not everything is about making a buck (although much is - at the end of the day).
So for example, some motives out there are purely destructive. Or at least they are so lowbrow and random in their consideration as to be indistinguishable from entirely senseless acts.
We look at them and say "What's the business angle here?". Sometimes there really isn't one. And it's not ideological either, like championing free-speech, democracy, communism or whatever. Nor discordian, nihilistic and chaotic.
Boredom, resentment, disrespct, low cost and consequences and "just because you can" are on the up because of "AI" and automation. I think we presume certain motives declined after the early years of trophy-hacking and ego hacks gave way to structured cybercrime in the 90s. But machine learning and "at scale" thinking is unleashing a different breed of senselessness. Poisoning of public data spaces by ostensible "advertising", whether as email spam, highly adaptive link-farms, GPT generated bait-copy and whatnot is a new quality of threat. Search engines don't seem able to manage it, so the "internet" (what is left of the Web) is starting to resemble a derelict neighbourhood with smashed windows, upturned trash cans and graffiti everywhere as bored and desperate gangs roam.
They extremely aggressively game Maps and AdWords to ensure that their numbers are on top of results.
Most of the guys they send out also I don't think are qualified locksmiths, based on the level of damage they tend to do when gaining access!
When I lived there I simply told my friends to call me instead, I'd get their doors open for a few beers.
Door to door locked trailer is more expensive and harder to find unless you do something like pods.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-lock...
A/k/a spam-as-a-service.
18 offshore leadgen consumers jump on your post, pretend to be calling from local numbers, and offer to broker a call to a local vendor on your behalf.
Then they keep calling for several weeks just in case you don't hate them enough.
What OP describes is an anomaly that should be easy to fix by any platform, and if they are smart, they will fix it - or decay slowly (at least I hope this is what will happen, and that they take Amazon & Google Search with them too).
Quality is just natural progression. Good food survive and bad food keep being replaced with new restaurants. Just like traditional restaurant industry.
Quality food and drink are extremely sensitive to timing, as in minutes matter, and if you are talking about a developed country keep in mind that consumers are sophisticated and getting more so by year, they are aware about it and pay attention to it and this will be reflected in the market.
If convenience really trumped everything we would all be eating dry instant noodle out of the packaging. Delivery may remain a thing in the suburbs but it would always be a second rate option.
It's not just low quality crap restaurants that do this. Like anything you get what you pay for. Better restaurants pay for better quality stuff but still mostly prepared by Sysco and finished at the restaurant.
I’ve worked back of house at a “almost michelan star” restaurant (best rated in town!) and even though the chef did actually go to the butcher for meat cuts, we still had a Sysco truck stopping by every day.
Recruiters were onced skilled professionals, but they got replaced by people who spoke almost unrecognizable English and who basically spammed all day to find talent. They didn't even read resumes, so you would get calls (and later emails) for crap that was nowhere on your resume. This basically ruined what was once a very effective way of finding jobs and gigs. It took over a decade for this garbage approach to fade and real recruiters to reappear.
The companies hated it too, because they would get innundated with every resume one of these brainless recruiters would send. Companies couldn't find real talent due to the piles of unqualified candidates. That's not to say the candidates were bad, but they were not qualified for the particular skills the client needed.
Then the offshoring craze developed, and suddenly skilled developers were laid off en masse, with the more senior developers actually being tasked with training their offshored replacements. Predictably, most of the replacements were people with some basic training and absolutely no ability to think for themselves. The end result was about two decades of stalled progress in corporate software development and artificially depressed wages.
This restaurant scenario seems to be just another variation. One must wonder if this is a cultural thing. It seems obviously doomed to eventual failure, and like the other situations I described it will bring the actual good services down with it.
Generate tens of thousands of brand identities (random name + random e-mail address) and mail-merge them onto basically the same resume, maybe with some minor wording perturbations. Flood companies with these resumes and then sit back and wait for one of your brands to slip through their hiring algorithms, and you got the interview. If you eventually get the job and they ask about the name, just say it was an old alias, and you'd prefer to go by [your real] name.
I'm not clear what the origin was - if I set it up late one night to cause trouble, if someone else did it and tagged it with my email address as a joke, or if some resume scraping software borked something up.
Anyway, Franklyn gets invited to interview for $320k/year roles now.
Of course it would also just make things worse, in that companies already tend to get innundated with garbage (or at least really not well aligned) candidates. This would just add more poop to the swimming pool. Eventually nobody wants to go near it, and the owners of the pool just turn their backs and find alternatives.
This last point is another reason that networking and personal connections are almost always the best way to get job opportunities (often before they even reach the recruiters).
As a younger guy, I've always wondered why there are so many "fossil" legacy critical applications at my company. They can only run on a VM and appear unaltered from their last version in the late 90s / early 2000s.
Pretty sure some of them can only run on IE6.
It seems like what’s happening now is similar to what happens in Amazon which is the generation of multiple throwaway brands in a bid to flood the marketplace and also farm positive ratings
The other aspect I've noticed is that most of these things are laser-targeted in terms of what they offer. Though they operate out of a full-service restaurant they'll offer just burgers, or just wings, etc. I think this one has to do with the way that the delivery apps deaccentuate the actual identities of restaurants: they really encourage you to just search/browse for a type of food, so this is sort of a gaming of that system.
Always better to go to a place that has its reputation on the line.
For the most part if you’re discerning with ratings numbers when you choose you should be good.
My suspicion on the business model with this scammer is that they go order from other restaurants after getting and order and get it for delivery. The prices in the delivery apps are generally marked up by up to 50% by the restaurants so you can do a good margin by being a shitty middle man.
They were absolutely terrible, like the garbage frozen cookies that SYSCO sells to restaurants. I bet you know how this ends.
Zoomed in on the map where they were supposedly from. And it was a Pizza shop that also sold the same awful cookies.
It was actually shocking to me how and why the original restaurant was willing to dilute their brand name with that sludge. Meanwhile that ghost kitchen location 6899 Mission Street in Daly City churns out a bunch of other brand name restaurant food that aren't actually located there.
Googling the address in Daly City shows a "Local Food Hall" https://www.grubhub.com/restaurant/local-food-hall-daly-city...
Park Mediterranean, a Humphry Slocombe, a Subway and also Dosa all at the same address. And the "Local Food Hall" has locations with other restuarants cobbled together in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Milbrae and San Jose.
Good times…
Normal money laundering with cash businesses has the problem that each bit of storefront can only plausibly earn so much money. This seems like a pretty nice way to get around this limit.
What the author doesn't realise is that cloud kitchens are a part of the business model of both Swiggy and Zomato.
In fact they have many "cloud kitchens" that are run by them. Another business model they have is to identify successful restaurants with huge demand, and contract with them to open a kitchen-only restaurant in another area (they make more profit when deliveries are short distant; so if a far-away restaurant has a lot of demand from a distant area most people don't order because of the higher delivery charges which means disgruntled customers who crib about the high charges). My friend is a chef and he explored the option of tying with them, but dropped the plan as he didn't want a kitchen-only restaurant. I learnt about the contract model when I called up my 2 of my favourite restaurants to complain about the drastic drop in quality of their food - they then told me that was because it was a Swiggy cloud-only kitchen with a new cook nearer to where I live. Like the author, I too was pissed that Swiggy hadn't properly informed me (through their listing) that this was not the restaurant from which I regularly ordered. One of these cloud-kitchen shut down because the original restaurant began to get bad reviews. I believe it was after these kind of issues, that Swiggy and Zomato allowed restaurants to use a different brand for cloud kitchens. And now, it appears, they also allow multiple listings by same restaurants / kitchen-only places too.
I now follow the simple rule of only ordering from dine-in restaurants that I have had food from. Or from old and reputed brands of restaurants in my area.
Not only that, but the platform fees will eat like half of your money so this would be an outrageously stupid way to launder money. And then, you’d also need to have large amounts of money split over a large quantity of different credit cards for this idea to make sense.
Not sure about rest, but UK side these accounts can be in abbreviated form...to the point where you can't really see anything meaningful
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpgd7/the-mystery-of-fcking...
Take Behrouz Biriyani and Faasos in India. These are operated by the same company - and almost always from the same location. However because they have 2 different listings and thus 2 separate menus, they are able to create a relatively cohesive and simple menu for each listing.
So on first glance Behrouz Biriyani, looks fairly straightforward. It serves Biriyanis (with a lot of variants/sizes/combos etc). And Faasos serves wraps, rolls and other related snack foods.
If you did not know that these were essentially from the same place, you would assume that these were separate restaurants with relatively focussed menu, hence passing said cardinal rule.
With physical restaurants, the rule is easier to apply. With deliveries, it's far more difficult as the huge, unfocussed menus get separated into different restaurant listings.
Same reason you’ll find a burger at the local Chinese/Mexican place, so the kids will shut up (one fo the absolute best burgers I’ve ever had was from a small burrito shop so appearances can be deceiving).
QR code on the bag led to a Linktree that just linked 3 delivery services. No other internet presence. Drove past the address from Deliveroo on my way home and it was a row of shopfronts with iirc a delivery pizza restaurant as the only food there.
But the food was so good that my hosts have kept on ordering from there.
The UK does have the predatory type of ghost kitchen as well and I have never ordered from them. The incentives are skewed towards getting new customers, not repeat ones, and just ripping off as many as you can find.
From the article
I took one bite and spat it out.
Now those 1000 game cartridges are all just MAME rips of commercial games.
The main restaurant was a pizza/pasta/burger restaurant.
They also had a sub-brand named "burger xyz" or something similar, and only sold burgers. Same phone number.
I compared prices and the burgers were all named the same, but more expensive in their standalone brand.
I guess it was targeting people ordering a specific type of food.
The line chart was great as well showing the huge number of listings for that one kitchen.
I don’t live in India and I wondered what FSSAI is, so I looked that up as well. It’s the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India: https://www.fssai.gov.in/
The author is performing a public service that I feel ought to be done by the authority in question in the first place. I hope the article gets lots of traction and serves as an example for food safety authorities worldwide to prevent this kind of trickery.
I’m leaning towards subscribing to the author’s newsletter; at the end of the article they mention that they were the ones who posted that recent fake IMDB credit article which I also saw on HN, and I’m looking forward to reading the article on the early Indian internet (https://peabee.substack.com/p/15-mafatlal-and-the-early-indi...). (I once had a chance to see Vint Cerf give a talk and while it was a while ago I remember enjoying it.)
Last note: I thought it was kind of funny how the author resorted to using Google maps photos of the kitchens. I thought it would be worth an excursion outside to get more recent photos and see them first hand, but maybe the author has mobility issues or something. I feel it would add a personal touch though.
There are legitimate reasons for a cloud kitchen wishing to run multiple brands/food concepts that are fine and actually very entrepreneurial. For example, someone could wish to run multiple different food concepts (Chinese, Thai, Pizza, Mexican, etc.), each with limited menus and cross use a bulk of the ingredients, and instead of having one huge disjointed menu, you can more accurately cater and be found by hungry eaters who are looking for that specific cuisine. As long as you're providing quality food at good prices then you'll be competitive with other restaurants within your chosen cuisines and be able to cater to more of the demand-side of the marketplace.
Googled for more reviews, and found out it's just the fancy sounding name for the godawful Chuck E Cheese kitchen.
But there is one business [1] that's popped up which is a cloud kitchen by definition, but they bring in chefs, partner with established restaurants and teach them their signature dishes, and open satellite kitchens on food delivery services as a hub in particular neighbourhoods. It's a win for everyone. The restaurants get to expand their brand to neighbourhoods without opening a physical location, the neighbourhoods get some good food in their hoods without having to live in the city, and you can also order a couple of things from entirely different restaurants on the same order, saving delivery.
It was the worst Thai food I have ever had by about ten miles. Like, I have never had Thai food that approached "okay" - it's always been at least "good."
The rice was dry, felt like it had been out all day or maybe reheated from the fridge. The chicken was seasoned as if it had been intended for Mexican food (on its own, not bad, but didn't taste like Thai food at all). My pad thai tasted bland. How bad does a pad thai recipe need to be to taste BLAND? Unbelievable.
Find a good restaurant and call direct. Perhaps make some friends that do deliveries, so you can trust them too.
The free market only really works when their is sufficient competition, rational consumers should avoid big players, if at all possible, because it is never in your interest. If you are forced to purchase from them take it up with the government that is meant to be keeping the market free.
I'm sure creative business types hate it when geeks who know how to search stuff profile their weird little approaches to trying to survive in today's economy and act like they clearly must be up to no good simply for having a large number of x, having no real evidence that the food is particularly bad or something.
Their next play looks like they're extending the ghost kitchen model to retail storefronts, so get ready to be flooded with non-existent shops that sell drop-shipped garbage using rapid delivery.
For instance, where I live (England, so granted not a gastronomical paradise) the best pizzas in town are from a chain that is only available through the local Deliveroo's dark kitchen.
This absolutely does not matter to me. What does is the product I get.
I remember back when I was at university we had a friend who worked for a rather successful artisanal coffee shop. The owner then opened up 2-3 other coffee places under completely different names around the city. I wonder how many people actually knew that their little coffee shop was part of a mini empire.
It's not nearly as bad as large breweries trying to muscle in on the microbrewery scene with a subbrand. That genuinely gets my blood pressure up.
I was astonished that the first one seemed to actually have tables!
Prepared by each restaurant you have Mexican, Peruvian, Chinese, Soul Food—but it’s all chicken from Restaurant Depot.
Let me explain.
There is an important turning point, I think, in every country where you develop antibodies against the worst kinds of scams. Scams we may have let loose. But by the 1920s, most Americans would not trust a witch doctor (even if they would have trusted him in 1890). In the case of Russia, their leadership longs for 1890; they reject western modernity altogether and want to reenact a medieval war. For China it's more like: let's take the methods and eject the "false" morals. What they don't realize is that our (possibly stupid) individual morals are the only thing that hold the fruitful methods of capitalism in check for us, in our country. Our so-called morals are not for others; they are the way to restrain ourselves.
To be more specific, Russia has a morality misaligned with successful capitalism - they think rejection and revanchism are the key to prosperity; China has a morality too aligned with it - they do not see that individual freedoms and happiness are crucial; and America has forgotten its meaning altogether, because it no longer cares about individuals or the group, only identity-disordered affinity groups.
So tl;dr capitalism is a big tree that will uproot your house, or it can be tamed into a small tree that provides shade and sustenance; or it can be chopped down leaving you with nothing. The progression of 19th century societies who had no prior history to work from was to go through those three phases and return to a median. The progression of societies just encountering the full brutal force of lying, mercenary, vicious capitalism for the first time will probably be the same trajectory... but it would be helpful if they learned from our mistakes and (legally) stopped these things. The legal system is the best brake on abuses of capitalism; it's the natural counterpart that evolves over the years. If you want to fix this problem, fix the legal system.
I'm from a history of Jews who were all lawyers. Not allowed into universities. Not allowed to partake in the mainstream civilization of Germany or Russia or Ukraine or America... but versed in their laws and the contradictions inherent in their laws. You find this shit, this data that shows horrible mismanagement and crime in your country? Learn the laws better than the ones who wrote them know them. Then, sue the motherfuckers under their own laws. That's how you get a civilized country.
