- Restaurants are scaling back their “ghost kitchen” operations due to increased stress and customer complaints.
- Brands like Wendy’s and Kroger are closing their ghost kitchens, the Times reported.
- Ghost kitchens were an exciting innovation in the pandemic era. But anonymity has bred lower standards.
Ghost kitchens – once celebrated as an effective innovation for the food industry – are now haunted by their own anonymity.
Ghost kitchens are restaurants with no windows or seats that customers never see and only deliver. It seemed like a good idea during the COVID-19 pandemic. Restaurants and so-called virtual brands have invested massively in it.
But demand has declined as the pandemic has eased and the reliance on multiple layers of faceless technology has led to complaints about quality. Ultimately, customers never connected with most brands. And now, many restaurants and virtual brands say the stress isn’t worth it, according to the New York Times.
Several influencers and celebrities have used ghost kitchens to produce their own lines of food, such as YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known online as Mr. Beast, who created MrBeast Burger in December 2020.
“Stranger Things” actor Noah Schnapp also opened a chicken tender chain called TenderFix in March 2023, which worked out of about 1,000 IHOP kitchens to prepare his dishes. It is also unclear whether TenderFix is still operational. The company’s social media pages haven’t been updated in about a year and its website is no longer available.
Major brands like Wendy’s and Kroger are scaling back their ghost kitchen operations after the kitchens struggled to keep up with orders and received complaints from customers, according to the Times.
Brinker International, which owns Chili’s and many other restaurant chains, opened two virtual restaurants during the pandemic called It’s Just Wings and Maggiano’s Italian Classics, which used Chili’s locations to prepare their dishes. But last year, as more customers began returning to in-person dining, the company struggled to juggle both. So Brinker closed Maggiano’s and scaled back It’s Just Wings in 2023, according to the Times.
“Everyone thought that if you had the manpower and equipment it would be easy to run virtual brands, but the reality is that most of the lead times for virtual brands are during peak periods. point of the usual restaurant,” said Kevin Hochman, CEO of Brinker. Times. “It was too hard to have a busy dinner with an influx of virtual orders coming in as well.”
And as quality problems and delivery delays worsen, some ghost kitchens are beginning to face legal challenges. In August 2023, Donaldson sued his ghost kitchen partner, Virtual Dining Concepts, claiming in court documents that some customers complained about receiving raw meat. For now, Virtual Dining Concepts still operates MrBeast Burger.
“A father of two felt like he had ‘let his kids down’ by ordering MrBeast Burgers when he received extremely poor quality food in unbranded packaging which he was able to trace back to a 7-11,” the lawsuit states.
Cracker Barrel also opened its own virtual restaurant using CloudKitchens, another ghost kitchen group, according to Restaurant Business.
CloudKitchens, owned by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, faces a class-action lawsuit that claims the company misrepresented the true origin of the food customers order on food delivery apps like Grubhub and Doordash.
Still, some chains like Denny’s are fully embracing the cloud kitchen model, the Times reported. The company owns three virtual brands, Banda Burrito, The Meltdown and Burger Den.
Denny’s President and CEO Kelli Valade told the outlet that it was able to meet higher customer demand than most other chains because Denny’s locations were open 24 hours a day .
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