Food Delivery Networks

Redefining the Restaurant Industry in the Digital Age

Ghost kitchens will likely revolutionize the restaurant industry in the same way content delivery networks (CDNs) did for webpages and the internet. When you type a website’s URL into the search bar, the page that’s returned isn’t coming from across the country. Rather, it comes from a server close by in your region. This is because the page is loaded from a CDN - a series of servers dispersed across the world, enabling web pages to be served locally. Smaller distance equals lower latency equals faster load speeds. Above all, what these networks do is allow quick access to content that originated a great distance away. They make it so a YouTube video plays as soon as it's clicked on. They’re great, basically.

Ghost kitchens, operated ideally, should serve the same function. A restaurant deploys its menu to a network of these remote kitchens. Patrons in cities containing distributed kitchens, then, are able to order from a nearby fulfillment center. This is the idea of the Food Delivery Network, the "FDN". Delivery not in the direct language of DoorDash or UberEats, but in the language of delivering to locations where the food isn’t originated. Uploading to these networks is a great analogue to deploying to a server - you have to upload recipe and method instructions in the same way packages are installed and startup instructions provided. The user has to teach the server instance how to distribute their content. How to cook up the special sauce.

The premise that you can’t get exactly what you want to eat when you want is friction. If your favorite spaghetti dish is served in Boston and you live in San Francisco, you’re out of luck. This doesn’t have to be the case. Optimally, that Boston restaurant uploads their menu to the FDN, and a kitchen near you produces and delivers that delicious spaghetti to you. Friction removed. The restaurant profits from this transaction, and both parties get a net positive value add. You downloaded food into your stomach because the restaurant uploaded that food to the network.

There’s nothing intrinsically new about this idea. After all, franchises are effectively the same concept. A restaurant like McDonald’s makes their menu globally available by opening more and more franchises. Installing more and more servers effectively. What’s different about Ghost Kitchens is that they’re a fraction of the cost to start and operate, making them viable for a greater breadth of restaurants whose models aren’t already set up for mass distribution. "Simplicity" is the name of the game (acknowledging that presently this isn’t necessarily the case).

Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens is aptly named. For that’s a key dimension of what Ghost Kitchens are: a cloud for restaurants to deploy their menus globally. Operationally, these kitchens aren’t at a point of efficiency - restaurants aren’t either, for that matter - where this pipe works as cleanly as outlined above. When they do, however, access to food is going to open up in a way unseen up to this point.