I want more costcos.<p>To people who don't know, part of the core of Costco's business model is curation, which leads to customer trust. I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. I <i>know</i> that anything with a kirkland brand on it is going to be <i>so</i> high quality and <i>so</i> cheap that it feels like I found a cheat.<p>What's funny about costco is that their in store experience is <i>so</i> good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence. Yeah they have a website, but it doesn't seem to actually have a comprehensive list of everything they sell. You have to go to the store and check out what they have (and get a hot dog or a piece of pizza while you're there)<p>If there was a delivery app that curated restaurants, I would absolutely love it, and I also think it would be really successful.
I mean, why not?<p>Companies like Unilever have been doing this for far longer than anyone in the restaurant space. Churn out thousands of brands that supposedly "compete" with each other in the marketplace. If one of those brands has a reputation problem, shut it down and replace it. Rinse and repeat.<p>If the practice is distasteful, then change the law, but beware the lobbyists.
I just can't believe that aggregator sites would be gamed by bad actors... Shocked, I tell you.<p>Also, on all of these delivery services I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option. I want to support local businesses — actual restaurants. It's annoying having to research any new place I want to try to make sure it's not operated out of the back side of some warehouse.<p>(Also: "Curate," don't aggregate. It's a little more expensive and requires actual knowledge, which is why no one wants to do it. But then you actually become a service people can trust.)
I ran an Uber Eats-only toasted sandwich business with my brothers for a month as an experiment - we rented a small room with no shopfront, and while we were popular, realised it was difficult to grow revenue when your only source of orders was via the gatekeeper apps (Uber Eats, etc) that take a high margin, and your at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others.<p>This makes me think anyone running a cloud kitchen is going to always be under the thumb of the apps/landlord with no way to expand revenue.
I made the mistake of ordering late-night cookies, for stoner reasons. The photos looked decent and ignoring the price gouging I hit SUBMIT<p>They were absolutely terrible, like the garbage frozen cookies that SYSCO sells to restaurants. I bet you know how this ends.<p>Zoomed in on the map where they were supposedly from. And it was a Pizza shop that also sold the same awful cookies.
Looking forward to the next iteration of this: Decentralised cloud kitchens.<p>Do you have a freezer and a microwave? Then you, too can become a restaurant owner - just download our app and register! Once you signed up, we'll send you a week's supply of frozen meals from our selection. You can accept orders from our app, simply reheat one item, repackage it, wait for our delivery specialist to arrive and you're good to go! For a modest 30% fee we'll take care of all the rest!
This low-quality shotgun approach (that these kitchens are using) remind me of the recruiting and offshoring plagues of the early 2000s.<p>Recruiters were onced skilled professionals, but they got replaced by people who spoke almost unrecognizable English and who basically spammed all day to find talent. They didn't even read resumes, so you would get calls (and later emails) for crap that was nowhere on your resume. This basically ruined what was once a very effective way of finding jobs and gigs. It took over a decade for this garbage approach to fade and real recruiters to reappear.<p>The companies hated it too, because they would get innundated with every resume one of these brainless recruiters would send. Companies couldn't find real talent due to the piles of unqualified candidates. That's not to say the candidates were bad, but they were not qualified for the particular skills the client needed.<p>Then the offshoring craze developed, and suddenly skilled developers were laid off en masse, with the more senior developers actually being tasked with training their offshored replacements. Predictably, most of the replacements were people with some basic training and absolutely no ability to think for themselves. The end result was about two decades of stalled progress in corporate software development and artificially depressed wages.<p>This restaurant scenario seems to be just another variation. One must wonder if this is a cultural thing. It seems obviously doomed to eventual failure, and like the other situations I described it will bring the actual good services down with it.
When someone pitched the idea of cloud kitchens to me a few years ago, the idea was you would have a centralized facility running multiple kitchens each of which was a single restaurant entity. It made sense as a way to run takeout only operations.<p>It seems like what’s happening now is similar to what happens in Amazon which is the generation of multiple throwaway brands in a bid to flood the marketplace and also farm positive ratings
We have something similar here in the US. For certain types of services, every listing you find online (it used to be in the phone book in the olden days), is really the same generic service. In fact, the service you’re calling is some middleman who doesn’t actually perform the service, but instead contracts it out to someone local to you. They often live and operate elsewhere in the country. This is the case for flower delivery, and, I recently discovered, bee removal. I’m sure there are others. But in general if you go to a search engine and type “$service $location” (I.e. “bee removal Los Angeles”), you’ll get tons of these types of listings.
I'm sure it's against both's ToS but that doesn't really matter. The concern here is spamming on the third party ordering apps and clearly trying to appear as other legitimate brands. Hopefully the reviews shown in the app will detract people from ordering from them (if it were a popular restaurant then surely a low rating would be a red flag?).<p>There are legitimate reasons for a cloud kitchen wishing to run multiple brands/food concepts that are fine and actually very entrepreneurial. For example, someone could wish to run multiple different food concepts (Chinese, Thai, Pizza, Mexican, etc.), each with limited menus and cross use a bulk of the ingredients, and instead of having one huge disjointed menu, you can more accurately cater and be found by hungry eaters who are looking for that specific cuisine. As long as you're providing quality food at good prices then you'll be competitive with other restaurants within your chosen cuisines and be able to cater to more of the demand-side of the marketplace.
I ordered a David Chang burger from (what I didn't know was) a ghost kitchen. It took me 5 minutes wandering around an abandoned parking lot to realize the filthy trailer with no signage was where I was supposed to pick up my food. The trailer smelled like old fryer oil, and the guys working inside seemed... generally unaware...<p>I took one bite and spat it out.
Is this what will finally take down delivery? There’s also the “one restaurant, thousands of different kitchen” with mr beast opening beast burger locations all over the US thanks to ghost restaurants. It makes zero sense to me but again, I never order delivery because it’s cold, expensive, and less good.
Ah, reminds me of a recent experience. Looking for a local, nonchain pizza place and came across a nice Italian sounding place, Pasqually's Pizza & Wings.<p>Googled for more reviews, and found out it's just the fancy sounding name for the godawful Chuck E Cheese kitchen.
Could this be money laundering? By running 180 separate 'companies' you split any large amounts 180 ways. Anyone who checks if they can order sees that, indeed, each of these businesses is 'real'.<p>Normal money laundering with cash businesses has the problem that each bit of storefront can only plausibly earn so much money. This seems like a pretty nice way to get around this limit.
Related, from March 2021:<p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpgd7/the-mystery-of-fcking-good-pizza-travis-kalanick-cloudkitchens-future-foods-delivery-restaurants" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpgd7/the-mystery-of-fcking...</a>
A cardinal rule of choosing restaurants is to avoid the ones with huge, unfocused menus. The quality is uniformly terrible and the kitchens are often unsanitary. I imagine that running one of these in the dark is not going to improve on that baseline.
I was evaluating natural text to speech packages a year or so a go. And I was left with the eerie feeling that at least half of the offering must have been fronts for the same company/person, if not also exactly the same software. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sing-up and payment workflows of the various packages that followed exactly same pattern. So either in one corner of that market everyone copied each other there, or somebody just saturated that corner with their offerings.
We have a few shitty ones of these, mostly doing pizzas, burgers etc. nearby.<p>But there is one business [1] that's popped up which is a cloud kitchen by definition, but they bring in chefs, partner with established restaurants and teach them their signature dishes, and open satellite kitchens on food delivery services as a hub in particular neighbourhoods. It's a win for everyone. The restaurants get to expand their brand to neighbourhoods without opening a physical location, the neighbourhoods get some good food in their hoods without having to live in the city, and you can also order a couple of things from entirely different restaurants on the same order, saving delivery.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.huuva.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.huuva.io/</a>
This is peak RAAS. It's just like all the generic brands on Amazon/Alibaba same company but diversify branding to camouflage yourself among the forest.
Made the mistake of ordering Thai food from a ghost kitchen restaurant from Doordash in Redwood City (they have a kitchen here).<p>It was the worst Thai food I have ever had by about ten miles. Like, I have never had Thai food that approached "okay" - it's always been at least "good."<p>The rice was dry, felt like it had been out all day or maybe reheated from the fridge. The chicken was seasoned as if it had been intended for Mexican food (on its own, not bad, but didn't taste like Thai food at all). My pad thai tasted bland. How bad does a pad thai recipe need to be to taste BLAND? Unbelievable.
What was funny to me was the name "Taste of China" and when you look at the menu, none of it refers to common chinese food. All of it refers to indian food.
Not heard Swiggy and Zomato but I guess the moral of the story is don't trust them and don't give them your business.
Just like your don't trust Amazon or Alibabab or any of these other shop aggregators that do not really care what goes on under their name.<p>Find a good restaurant and call direct. Perhaps make some friends that do deliveries, so you can trust them too.<p>The free market only really works when their is sufficient competition, rational consumers should avoid big players, if at all possible, because it is never in your interest.
If you are forced to purchase from them take it up with the government that is meant to be keeping the market free.
Related, this recent thread about Doordash/GrubHub was (in a way) kind of hilarious:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339894" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339894</a>
Not what I was expecting to read by any stretch of the imagination. I was looking forward to seeing some piece about how restaurants have evolved to virtual spaces and delivery first thanks to the pandemic or some such.<p>I'm sure creative business types hate it when geeks who know how to search stuff profile their weird little approaches to trying to survive in today's economy and act like they clearly must be up to no good simply for having a large number of x, having no real evidence that the food is particularly bad or something.
I noticed this with a local restaurant, but didn't actually mind.<p>The main restaurant was a pizza/pasta/burger restaurant.<p>They also had a sub-brand named "burger xyz" or something similar, and only sold burgers. Same phone number.<p>I compared prices and the burgers were all named the same, but more expensive in their standalone brand.<p>I guess it was targeting people ordering a specific type of food.
i feel like i’m the only one not on the food delivery bandwagon. i have ordered delivery food exactly 0 times in the last 5 years. probably even 10. i know i’m an outlier. no i won’t change
Reminder every time I see a ghost kitchens story that one of the bigger players in the space, REEF, uses ghost kitchens to harvest data for real estate and came into the angle as a parking vendor that needed to make money from lots that went vacant during the COVID-19 pandemic, and harvested data from parking customers to re-sell as highly geo-specific market and demographic trends. They've fully pivoted to becoming a property management type that will take your unused property and stuff it full of ghost kitchens, still harvesting data from those transactions to re-sell as market/demographic data.<p>Their next play looks like they're extending the ghost kitchen model to retail storefronts, so get ready to be flooded with non-existent shops that sell drop-shipped garbage using rapid delivery.
What matters is the food.<p>For instance, where I live (England, so granted not a gastronomical paradise) the best pizzas in town are from a chain that is only available through the local Deliveroo's dark kitchen.<p>This absolutely does not matter to me. What does is the product I get.
I don't like the idea, mostly because it means there is a much greater chance of a restaurant where I enjoy something being churned out rather than any puritanical argument that restaurants have to exist in a particular form.<p>I remember back when I was at university we had a friend who worked for a rather successful artisanal coffee shop. The owner then opened up 2-3 other coffee places under completely different names around the city. I wonder how many people actually knew that their little coffee shop was part of a mini empire.<p>It's not nearly as bad as large breweries trying to muscle in on the microbrewery scene with a subbrand. That genuinely gets my blood pressure up.
Why should Swiggy Zomato care? They get paid to deliver food. These shops give them more business with less effort for the delivery people.<p>I was astonished that the first one seemed to actually have tables!
One of the delivery companies here in Spain Globo goes the next step and runs virtual kitchens themselves with virtual brands. I now have to double check if it’s a real restaurant before ordering anything.
Just make it one restaurant with a wide healthy menu, a decent app and a social conscious co-op feel rather than a predatory vibe and you could clean up without all the BS.
I imagine the quality is pretty low with the number of menu items that single batch of cooks is trying to make. When you read about struggling restaurants trying to make a comeback, a common theme is an attempt at simplifying the menu so that they can focus on a core set of high quality dishes, as their menu had gotten bloated and thus the average quality of a dish inevitably declined.
So much work to sell shitty food, if they would have put half that energy & creativity into making their food better they would have had an amazing restaurant.
So many restaurants like that where I live. they serve low quality food (ingredients, recipes, cooking, presentation), then change names regularly. This is even worse than the more traditional fastfoods where at least you know that what you get will more or less stay the same over the months.
Saw those cloud kitchens mentioned couple of days ago in another post on people "gaming" the system. (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559519</a>)
I been for a while on technical side of one of delivery company.
Fixing electric mopeds for them.
Its a BIG business and it does not really matter if makes money, its the investors corporate funds getting pumped into the food delivery industry.
Ha! And down in the village there are multiple restaurants, and each buys their goods from the same suppliers!<p>Prepared by each restaurant you have Mexican, Peruvian, Chinese, Soul Food—but it’s all chicken from Restaurant Depot.
I am aware of a cloud kitchen near where I live in Pune offering 9 brands - and I found it not bad actually. At least as of now...<p><a href="https://eatclub.in/" rel="nofollow">https://eatclub.in/</a>
Man, India seems like the Wild West. I lived in Vietnam during a brief explosion of internet connectivity and online consumerism -- mild by comparison. This isn't the kind of "democracy" or freedom of speech we would like to export as a civilization. I feel like American consumer/industry has just opened the doors to every kind of scam possible in countries which were not prepared for it. And many of them rebel as if it were a conquest, but it's not. It's progress. It just becomes grotesque when it's left to places <i>without law</i>.<p>Let me explain.<p>There is an important turning point, I think, in every country where you develop antibodies against the worst kinds of scams. Scams we may have let loose. But by the 1920s, most Americans would not trust a witch doctor (even if they would have trusted him in 1890). In the case of Russia, their leadership longs for 1890; they reject western modernity altogether and want to reenact a medieval war. For China it's more like: let's take the methods and eject the "false" morals. What they don't realize is that our (possibly stupid) individual morals are the <i>only thing that hold the fruitful methods of capitalism in check for us, in our country</i>. Our so-called morals are not for others; they are the way to restrain ourselves.<p>To be more specific, Russia has a morality misaligned with successful capitalism - they think rejection and revanchism are the key to prosperity; China has a morality <i>too</i> aligned with it - they do not see that individual freedoms and happiness are crucial; and America has forgotten its meaning altogether, because it no longer cares about individuals <i>or</i> the group, only identity-disordered affinity groups.<p>So tl;dr capitalism is a big tree that will uproot your house, or it can be tamed into a small tree that provides shade and sustenance; or it can be chopped down leaving you with nothing. The progression of 19th century societies who had no prior history to work from was to go through those three phases and return to a median. The progression of societies just encountering the full brutal force of lying, mercenary, vicious capitalism for the first time will probably be the same trajectory... but it would be helpful if they learned from our mistakes and (legally) stopped these things. The legal system is the best brake on abuses of capitalism; it's the natural counterpart that evolves over the years. If you want to fix this problem, <i>fix the legal system</i>.<p>I'm from a history of Jews who were all lawyers. Not allowed into universities. Not allowed to partake in the mainstream civilization of Germany or Russia or Ukraine or America... but <i>versed in their laws and the contradictions inherent in their laws</i>. You find this shit, this data that shows horrible mismanagement and crime in your country? <i>Learn</i> the laws better than the ones who wrote them know them. Then, sue the motherfuckers under their own laws. That's how you get a civilized country.