A rare glimpse into the sweeping — and potentially troubling — cloud kitchens trend
Greenspan continues on to explain that during an age when fewer people frequent restaurants, running one simply makes less and less sense. “[Opening] up a brick-and-mortar restaurant these days is just like giving yourself a job. Now [with centralized kitchens], as long as the product is coming out strong, I don’t need to be there as a presence. I can quality control remotely now. I can go online and [log out of a marketplace Uber Eats or Postmates] and not piss off any customers, because if I just decided to close the restaurant one day, and you drove over and it was closed, you’d be pissed. But if you’re looking for [one of my restaurants] in Uber Eats and you can’t find it because I turned it off, well, you’re not pissed. You just order something else.”
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
In an earlier post, I wrote:
What is a restaurant? What is its purpose? Is it to provide ambience? Or to provide cooked food unique to its kitchen?
And if it’s the latter, why bother with the overhead of a venue at all when only the kitchen is required?
Think about that. Amazon has basically decoupled goods from physical stores. Now companies like Peach are looking to decouple food from restaurants.
That is now happening. And if you’ve ever seen Kitchen Nightmares, it should scare the hell out of you.
And now it seems Gary Vee might be right when he claimed there will be no convenience stores in twenty years. That’s even scarier.
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