- Food delivery platform DoorDash has ventured into the ghost kitchen market.
- Its new ghost kitchen, DoorDash Kitchens, in Redwood City, California, allows five restaurant brands, including Chick-fil-A, a kitchen station in a shared space to focus solely on scaling their takeout business.
- Ghost kitchens are a hot trend in the food delivery arena. They allow restaurants to be closer to a market without shelling out the cash needed for a brick-and-mortar location.
- We paid DoorDash Kitchens a visit to see what it was like. Check it out.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
The San Francisco-based DoorDash is the first food delivery platform in the US to venture into the ghost kitchen market.
These types of kitchens go by many names, like commissary, virtual, dark, cloud, or ghost kitchens. But the idea is that restaurateurs can rent out kitchen stations in a shared space to allow them to scale their takeout business without taking up room in a traditional dine-in location.
They're "essentially WeWork for restaurant kitchens," as TechCrunch's Danny Crichton wrote.
And they're a hot trend in the food delivery world, allowing restaurants to be closer to a market without shelling out the cash needed for a brick-and-mortar location.
The ghost kitchen supplies each partner with everything they need, like sinks and cooking equipment. And these kitchens can also do marketing for its business partners, which is a feat provided by DoorDash Kitchens as well.
The food delivery platform's new ghost kitchen allows customers to order food for delivery or pickup on the DoorDash app and gives its restaurant brands, which include Chick-fil-A, access to six nearby markets for delivery and 13 for pickup. Both options include the Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and the affluent Atherton markets.
We paid the kitchen a visit to see what it was like. Check it out.