Ghost Kitchens are kitchens deprived of all amenities that create a dining atmosphere. They do not have counters or dining zones or service windows. These kitchens exist elsewhere, whereas the client is in a different geographical location. The food is delivered by a third party app to the point of need.
A traditional restaurant would possess a Kitchen, a reception, a dinning space (Air conditioned spaces / Open spaces). A certain amount of waiters and other staff, other infrastructure and its maintenance, Generators. Some restaurants have banquet halls as well. Imagine the amount of human force and maintenance that is needed to be done.
A ghost Kitchen on the contrary focuses on the essence of the business that is food. It has nothing else to it and the food is delivered to the expected place at expected time via a third party driver. Let us find out pros and cons of this kind of a kitchen.
PROS OF GHOST KITCHEN
GETTING INTO THE GAME WITH EXISTING PERSONNEL
If yours is a newly commenced business, this a great choice. Honestly, because until and unless you understand & learn your clients. Figure out strategies it is better to keep your ship anchored. So you can get a head start and commence with resources and then make changes naturally. A place , a staff etc. at the immediate moment isn’t required so you can move with your own pace. Flexibility and paying heavy rents or investing a lot of capital can be more. So you can start from your home.
USING AN UNUSED PORTION
This might be really good if you have an extra unused place or something that can be used. Say you have a house on the ground floor of an apartment which has an outhouse storage. You can use that to store raw materials and extra stock so that the it will not occupy your spaces. This might also be a reason you could think of starting a business as you possess any already.
HIGH PROFITS AND BETTER ANALYSIS OF SALES PATTERNS
This is another advantage of a ghost kitchen that you might as well increase your profits without any extra investment. This will help you monitor and plan for exact pricing, help you analyze business flow and much more.
You cut down expenses and you can just collaborate with a third –party application for delivery purposes. Except for the minimum expense of using a Food Delivery Software(or a pizza ordering system if your product is pizza). Rest all earned belongs to you. This will help you analyze and give time for increasing your profitability as Home delivery of food is largely preferred over dining outings.
SAVES TIME FOR EXPERIMENTATION
Flexible timings help you gain your own time, no travel time or chaos and independent handling helps you experiment with your specialties and gives you time and practice to cope up with trends and get better and also gives you an exact idea of handling a kitchen and managing orders. It helps you learn and gain all at the comfort of your home. There can’t be anything better than this, can it?
Just like anything else, this has its own limitations too. Let us have a look at what are the cons of ghost kitchens.
CONS
STUNTED GROWTH
This is one of the problems you might face as keeping everything on a small scale might deprive you of better outputs. It is quite possible that being habitual and working in a zone like this might restrict you to be known by others. You might lose the kind of publicity you require as compared to that of restaurants with an extra ordinary ambience. It might take you a little longer but again it is the matter of how you keep your clients interested.
POOR MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE
Social media is always an important internal part of any business. Campaigns and other promotional activities make it easier to keep the clients and probable clients engaged and interested. This helps in creation of a brand name, brand image and thus increase in the number of customers. Reviews, pictures etc. help a lot in promotion. These kitchens are like hideout places. They aren’t promoted and hence that hampers the main motive of a business.
INABILITY TO GENERATE ENOUGH REVENUE
As we all have well understood, these types of kitchens do not receive much of profits and revenues. We have all heard of you reap what you sow, it’s the same with these kitchens: more investments-more profits and these kitchens on the contrary are expense cutting ways of commencing something to discover and learn but not a full proof solution to generate a good revenue and build a concrete business.
LACK OF CUSTOMER CONFIDENCE
As these kitchens are not a brand, the customer might find them to be unreliable. Whenever we know where our food is coming from and If it is a brand we can blindly trust the fact that the food we’re going to receive will be of the best quality whereas to order from ghost kitchens honestly the customers have to take a leap of faith. Thus it makes a difference when the customer can confide in you.
So as we saw the above listed are some of the pointers that might help you decide the pros and cons of ghost kitchens. You can go with the alternative that suits you the best and according to your needs you can manipulate something just in case. Hope the article helped you gain insights and the grass seems always greener on the other side, hence hope this article helped you gain a neutral perspective. Baby steps are important if you are a new budding entrepreneur as you have a lot to learn in cases like that definitely Ghost kitchens are a better alternative.
