This post contains highlights from our webinar: How to Evaluate Virtual Kitchens. Follow this link to watch the webinar in its entirety.
At Kitchen United, our mission is to help restaurants expand their reach to the off-premise diner. Our innovative approach to virtual kitchens allows members to create exceptional pick-up and delivery experience and reach new customers with minimal risk in a crowded food delivery market. As a company on the forefront of off-premise dining, we get a lot of questions about virtual kitchens from restaurants looking to increase their capacity for takeout and delivery. Let’s take a look at some of the most common questions we receive:
Q: Is Kitchen United a ghost kitchen?
A: Yes, but no. Ghost kitchens are built for delivery only and are usually completely dependent on third-party delivery apps. Our solution is different: Kitchen United kitchen centers offer pick-up and delivery, as well as a consumer-facing front of house, ordering platform with in-person ordering, and brand presence. You’ll also find Kitchen United in dense urban areas with high traffic and high demand, whereas ghost kitchens are generally located in more industrial, less frequented neighborhoods. So while we are a virtual kitchen, we are not a ghost kitchen.
Q: What’s your model?
A: As a company that’s been on the forefront off-premise dining from the beginning, our model has evolved over time. What’s unique about our success is that our kitchen centers are optimized for pick-up, delivery, and catering. We build our locations with a consumer-facing front of house that ensures easy pick-up, and capitalized on the high traffic and high demand of dense urban neighborhoods.
And behind the scenes is a company operated by people passionate about the restaurant industry. Kitchen United was founded by restaurant people, and we are actively invested in every restaurant member’s success–which is why we don’t operate our own brands. Instead, we dedicate all of our resources to supporting our members.
Q: Is my restaurant a good fit for a virtual kitchen?
A: Our most successful members share the following attributes:
- Great food
- Great operator
- Great digital marketing
- Embrace pick-up, delivery, and catering
- Innovative and hardworking
Whether you’re a family-owned business or national fast food chain, we’ve found that these factors are more important than the size of your restaurant and correlate more with your success.
Q: What if your kitchen is smaller than my existing restaurant kitchen?
A: We work with you closely to adapt your operations to help you transition to an optimized virtual environment. This can include reworking your menu and the equipment needed to execute, designing the kitchen to meet your needs, and making sure your marketing and branding reaches your consumers.
Learn more about how to evaluate virtual kitchens in our webinar hosted by Anthony Green, SVP of Sales, Fia’apia Ewing, Sr. Director of Member Success, and Joy Lai, Chief Operating Officer.