It’s late at night. Arnob and his friends are watching their favorite team Barcelona’s match at his place. Suddenly heared a sound. Growl! Growl! What is that? Oh no. His stomach is howling for food and his brain is dreaming of crusted pizza with chicken, mushroom, and full of cheese. But it’s 2 am on the clock! All the restaurants are closed and local shopkeepers are sleeping under the shutters of their shops. He stood and went towards the kitchen knowing nothing can be found there. While passing the main door, a bell rang! His heart just skipped a beat. For some seconds he became a statue. Still, he opened the door. Someone brought pizza in real at this hour. He became shocked and looked at his friend’s beaming faces.

Do you think that was a ghost appeared and delivered it to him? Fortunately, not but it’s the ghost kitchen.

Ghost kitchen is a type of restaurant where there is no dining space. They get the order online, cook food and deliver it door to door. This also calls virtual, cloud, delivery-only, shadow, and dark kitchens.

Because of the Covid19 pandemic, this new concept has started to emerge from the past one to two years. About 60,000 restaurants were in our country, where 90% of them faced casualties due to covid19. The restaurant industry has suffered by USD 4.5 billion pitfall. However, they found a new way to turn this problem into an opportunity.

Ghost kitchen or cloud kitchen became very popular and appealing nowadays. The main reason for this is its cost-friendly model. You don’t need any fancy space or decoration. Just need a kitchen to prepare the food. Hence, infrastructure cost gets reduced which requires less investment than a physical restaurant. Any time you can start or scale up your business. It creates an alluring opportunity. Therefore, new entrances are rising; Following different models. However, most ghost kitchens are facing difficulties to sustain in our country.

So, let’s discuss some key issues.

Mostly, people start a business without enough research or experience, but enticed by others success in this industry. That’s the first deadly mistake they do! Firstly, starting any business, you should do a proper market research and find the gap. Understand your target customers. Then design a sustainable blueprint on how to fit your business in that gap. The more you research the more feasible and sustainable business model it becomes. That is why groundwork is a very important step!

Secondly, as it is a low-cost model, the competitor entrance is very high. However, when you start operating, you will see more costs are required which is often overlooked. As cloud kitchen is online-based, for branding or positioning you have to do a lot of online promotional activities. Many online platforms are offering different types of advisement opportunities. The most popular platform in our country is Facebook. You can boost posts, go live, give bumper or popup ads, etc. There are many other platforms alike. When we talk about advertisement it means money. Yes! To promote your business you need to give these platforms a certain amount of fees. And to create a successful campaign some brainstorming is required. In this case, most people take help from marketing agencies. On a whole, promotional activities require a good investment.

It doesn’t end here. Furthermore, for delivering, you can affiliate with a third-party food delivery partner or develop your logistic side. The second option is hassling for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises). Mostly in our country cloud kitchens take help from food delivery services and for this vendors need to pay. For instance, Pathao Food charges 20% of the ordered food price. Along with this, there are other costs as well. Therefore, it is not the low-budget industry as it seems at the beginning.

Ghost kitchen runs online. So you have to be always careful. The very moment food leaves your kitchen you have nothing in your hand to fix it. Accident might occur. Like food might not match customer’s taste or food can be damaged or cold while delivering. For these situations, you should have some internal and external policy to fix it as soon as possible before getting the situation out of control. The main mantra of cloud kitchen is consistency. If you can always keep your food quality and service up to the mark, you are ahead in the competition.

Cloud/ Ghost kitchen is a very competitive market. It is not that easy to put everything on the right place and sustain in the market. After all, you know what’s the most saddening part? Some customers or wicked competitors decorate false allegations. This malpractice of our society destroys many potential businesses. So try to be aware and make flexible plans to prevent these threats.

So, if you are planning to open one, keep these points on mind and thank me later.  But if you are just a foodie like me or Arnob, order food now! And, have fun!