Cloud Kitchens

📈 Trend / market theme — a space Kyle tracks from his Entity Ideas notebook (Trends section).

Idea capture (from Roam)

Cloud kitchens (also called ghost kitchens) are delivery-only commercial kitchens that serve restaurant brands without a dining room.

Hypothesis in the wild. Adam Nash called the concept one that “has legs”, joking that “on the internet, no one knows that you are Chuck E Cheese”. Nathan Baschez argued that Dominos had been “reaping the rewards of the ‘Cloud Kitchens’ hypothesis since 2010”, linking a Substack write-up on its stock performance.
Open question. In April 2020 Marshall Haas asked whether cloud kitchens were “crushing it right now” and whether anyone involved could shed light on how they were doing.
Landscape. Permanent Equity Weekly #53 quotes a New Yorker piece describing the space as increasingly crowded: Reef, Zuul and Kitchen United in the US, Deliveroo in London and Paris, Panda Selected in China, and CloudKitchens, the venture of Travis Kalanick’s City Storage Systems, which buys real estate, fits it with kitchen facilities and leases it to chefs and small-business owners. The article notes that opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant is high-risk and expensive.
Trend lists. Dru Riley’s Trends.vc thread on online courses closes by pointing readers to cloud kitchens among other trends, and Kyle’s Entity Ideas notebook lists it in its Trends section.

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Concepts: Entity Ideas