Governments shut down restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many owners quickly pivoted to find new ways to serve their customers and stay afloat.
Some entrepreneurial restaurant owners found this trend even more profitable than keeping their restaurant open.
But now, this once-popular food trend is starting to disappear as life gets back to normal and quality is more suspect.
Ghost Kitchens becoming a thing of the past
The concept of “ghost kitchens” was once a popular way to serve food to customers in the restaurant industry.
This trend refers to restaurants that have no storefront and no seating, and their customers never see them in real life.
Instead, ghost kitchens only deliver food to patrons who order their meals through a website or app, and the concept grew in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as many restaurants and virtual brands invested in the idea.
However, the demand for food from ghost kitchens has quickly decreased as heavy reliance on advanced technology and customer complaints regarding food quality become more burdensome.
Customers never connected with the brands, and some are now saying the stress isn’t worth the effort.
Some well-known influencers and celebrities have used ghost kitchens to sell their own food, including the popular YouTuber known as Mr. Beast, who created the MrBeast Burger in December 2020.
Actor Noah Schnapp of the Netflix television show Stranger Things opened a chicken tender chain called TenderFix in March 2023, which worked out of approximately 1,000 IHOP kitchens.
The company has not updated its social media pages in about a year and the website is no longer available, so it’s uncertain if TenderFix is still in business.
Larger brands like Kroger and Wendy’s are scaling back on their ghost kitchen operations after they struggled to keep up with orders.
The New York Times also found that the companies were dealing with increasing numbers of customer complaints.
Brinker International, which owns the Chili’s restaurant chain among others, opened two virtual restaurants called It’s Just Wings and Maggiano’s Italian Classics during the pandemic, both of which used Chili’s to prepare their food.
Last year, more customers started returning to eat in person, and the company found it more difficult to handle both business models at the same time, so Maggiano’s closed while It’s Just Wings scaled back operations in 2023.
Ghost kitchens became “too much”
When speaking with the Times, Brinker CEO Kevin Hochman said, “Everyone thought if you have the labor and the equipment, it would be easy to run virtual brands, but the reality is, most of the delivery times for virtual brands transact during busy times for the regular restaurant. It was too much to have a busy dinner rush with an influx of virtual orders coming in, too.”
Quality issues and late deliveries also became an issue, and some ghost kitchens even face legal challenges.
Donaldson sued his ghost kitchen partner, Virtual Dining Concepts, in August 2023 after claiming that some customers complained of receiving raw meat.
Virtual Dining Concepts is still currently operating MrBeast Burger, for now.
One lawsuit states, “One father of two felt as though he had ‘let his children down’ by ordering MrBeast Burgers when he received terrible quality food in unbranded packaging that he was able to trace back to a 7-11.”
Informed American will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
