At risk of them getting wind of this hack and ruining it: you can filter out basically all the ghost kitchens by filtering for pick-up orders - tends to be only legit restaurants that allow actual customers to collect food themselves. You can then change it to delivery when ordering.
Jim - your writing is consistently interesting and insightful. I don’t live in London (I work there) but LondonCentric is by far the best local news site I know of. Also what starts in London ends up everywhere else soon enough.
As a coeliac my primary concern is the allergen issue. Some brands are really good with allergens in-house but as soon as you have another kitchen cooking it, you introduce the chance of extra allergens or changes in workflow. I’d love to hear more about how they try to avoid this.
Great story, though it raises a concern for me. Following food poisoning from a deliveroo earlier this year, I now look up the hygiene rating of any new takeaways I order from. If you dont necessarily know where your food is coming from, Is this possible? I dont believe these apps share hygiene ratings.
The company arranging these request a 4 star rating, but do they re-check them regularly? As I understand from talking to a council hygiene expert a few years ago, lots of poorly rated restaurants dart between good and bad ratings, just about keeping themselves open. Many restaurants also dont get checked very often.
Maybe I'm being overly cautious but I'm not happy hearing about this practice without it being fully displayed upfront with detail of where the food is coming from.
As the end paragraph implies.... The output of these host kitchens is often at best average.
Disinterested cooks making it. Not as much training (or learning through repeat cooking) as a full brand restaurant. Host kitchens, like any franchise, might not have consistent quality in ingredients, prep process, hygiene that the brand could more easily enforce if it was their own kitchen.
The problem is that customers are happy to accept average, instead of seeking out above average from local independents. If you look at the ratings some of these brands in a host kitchen get, it's between 4 to 5. Which then gives that brand more visibility in the search results and the order volumes to make this viable.
Now, customers settling for average from a trusted brand is not unusual. Think Prezzo, Zizzi, Pizza Hut, etc on the high street.... Even GBK... but we've now largely shunned those chain brands on the High Street, hence why GBK ran into difficulty. Why are we accepting them on delivery platforms?
In principle—and I’ll come to the caveats—I don’t have a problem with this concept, mainly for one reason: if you do object to, say, GBK ingredients being cooked in a way GBK approves by staff GBK has trained, you’re more or less saying that what distinguishes your meal is the building it was cooked in. But the caveats are important: preparation and ingredients have to be up to a required standard. But the recognisable brands hopefully understand the reputational risk they’re taking and how important it is for them to maintain those standards.
I just think it feels a bit like everything in media; ultimately flattened to recognisable brands that pause you to briefly pause while scrolling a feed. But for food.
I can see that. Partly (of course, as with so much of consumer behaviour) we have to take some of that on the chin: we as consumers are in the position of ultimate power and can collectively determine which businesses prosper and which fail. I also think the dynamics at work are incredibly complex, bundling up price, quality, reputation, habit, chance, the vagaries of human instincts, availability, outside seemingly random influences, the zeitgeist…
The trouble is, if you've got a really good local e.g. Greek place near you, they could now be in competition with a bigger name brand like The Athenian. If the local gets run out of town, that's another empty unit.
It might be a hot take but I feel like these mass delivery businesses create more bad than good for a society. Do we really need to be able to choose from 800+ options of overpriced generic food? And for what? It causes higher prices for everyone (unsurprisingly, when you need 5 different actors to earn something), it drags food standards down, it congests cycle lanes with thousands of delivery riders using illegal bikes and ignoring traffic rules. It probably also promotes staying at home too much but I'm already feeling like an old man shouting at cloud at this point so let's not go down this lane :)
Not a hot take, just a reasonable one! It's such an unnecessarily complex system (and fairly exploitative to people like the drivers) it dilutes value everywhere - not to mention how it dilutes what should be a joyful experience ~ to "eat out"
Another angle on this is the impact on local high streets. Where we live, the high street is all burger and chicken shops. I can't imagine that the local area is sustaining that number of slightly different chicken shops, so this must be being sustained through deliveries. The result has been a local high street that offers little for local people
This is essentially just a variation on franchising; instead of buying into a whole, recognisable brand from the products on sale to the name above the door, it's simply local businesses providing a service to those with bigger, wider brand recognition. It is obviously leading to a degree of homogeneity, though, but if customers don't care that much, they'll get the quality of food they deserve.
Sorry, but this is just wrong - and with all due respect, I don't trust a French place churning out American ribs in the evening. And in line with a previous commenter, I am very concerned about allergen cross-contamination - I'm allergic to fish & seafood, so I won't even eat at a "Kebab & Chippie" because I don't trust them to avoid getting fish remnants on chips or a kebab. When Deliveroo started out, it was really nice because you could get really good food without having to call, but since it's exploded I only ever order from places that I genuinely know to be actual restaurants in my area. There isn't a Dishoom in my area, so I will find another great Indian restaurant, or go to the actual Dishoom restaurant.
For £15 you can go somewhere local and eat something genuinely nice! I'll never understand the obsession with delivered food that is inevitably luke-warm, mediocre, and still somehow expensive
Great article. Worrying that this trend will allow big brands to flood an area and force out independent competition, ironically using their kitchens to do it
I invest (small amounts) in lots of smaller, early stage businesses, typically through the two main platforms (Republic and CrowdCube). Over five year ago Peckwater Brands launched the host kitchen idea and (through various later investment raises) have seen their value 20x. It is fair to say that they a) have been doing this a lot longer than a year, and b) have been leaders in this in London.
PS I also invested in (cough) Really Local Group as loved that idea. Thanks for your piece on that, always great to surface things!
This makes me think of car parts. The best-quality components are the ones from the manufacturer, produced to the highest standards and priced accordingly, but in most cases they're actually manufactured by a third party and you can get a bargain by buying a "generic" part that's come off the same production line but had the official logo scraped off. I wonder if some host kitchens will end up surreptitiously selling white-label versions of the branded meals for less.
At risk of them getting wind of this hack and ruining it: you can filter out basically all the ghost kitchens by filtering for pick-up orders - tends to be only legit restaurants that allow actual customers to collect food themselves. You can then change it to delivery when ordering.
Genius!
Jim - your writing is consistently interesting and insightful. I don’t live in London (I work there) but LondonCentric is by far the best local news site I know of. Also what starts in London ends up everywhere else soon enough.
Hear, hear.
As a coeliac my primary concern is the allergen issue. Some brands are really good with allergens in-house but as soon as you have another kitchen cooking it, you introduce the chance of extra allergens or changes in workflow. I’d love to hear more about how they try to avoid this.
Great story, though it raises a concern for me. Following food poisoning from a deliveroo earlier this year, I now look up the hygiene rating of any new takeaways I order from. If you dont necessarily know where your food is coming from, Is this possible? I dont believe these apps share hygiene ratings.
The company arranging these request a 4 star rating, but do they re-check them regularly? As I understand from talking to a council hygiene expert a few years ago, lots of poorly rated restaurants dart between good and bad ratings, just about keeping themselves open. Many restaurants also dont get checked very often.
Maybe I'm being overly cautious but I'm not happy hearing about this practice without it being fully displayed upfront with detail of where the food is coming from.
You can check the hygiene rating (in fact you can filter on it), and it’ll link to the actual restaurant’s rating.
As the end paragraph implies.... The output of these host kitchens is often at best average.
Disinterested cooks making it. Not as much training (or learning through repeat cooking) as a full brand restaurant. Host kitchens, like any franchise, might not have consistent quality in ingredients, prep process, hygiene that the brand could more easily enforce if it was their own kitchen.
The problem is that customers are happy to accept average, instead of seeking out above average from local independents. If you look at the ratings some of these brands in a host kitchen get, it's between 4 to 5. Which then gives that brand more visibility in the search results and the order volumes to make this viable.
Now, customers settling for average from a trusted brand is not unusual. Think Prezzo, Zizzi, Pizza Hut, etc on the high street.... Even GBK... but we've now largely shunned those chain brands on the High Street, hence why GBK ran into difficulty. Why are we accepting them on delivery platforms?
Wait, so the Athenian is cooking GBK orders, while the Little Kebab House is cooking Athenian orders?
Yes!
That is so bonkers I thought it had to be a typo!
In principle—and I’ll come to the caveats—I don’t have a problem with this concept, mainly for one reason: if you do object to, say, GBK ingredients being cooked in a way GBK approves by staff GBK has trained, you’re more or less saying that what distinguishes your meal is the building it was cooked in. But the caveats are important: preparation and ingredients have to be up to a required standard. But the recognisable brands hopefully understand the reputational risk they’re taking and how important it is for them to maintain those standards.
I just think it feels a bit like everything in media; ultimately flattened to recognisable brands that pause you to briefly pause while scrolling a feed. But for food.
I can see that. Partly (of course, as with so much of consumer behaviour) we have to take some of that on the chin: we as consumers are in the position of ultimate power and can collectively determine which businesses prosper and which fail. I also think the dynamics at work are incredibly complex, bundling up price, quality, reputation, habit, chance, the vagaries of human instincts, availability, outside seemingly random influences, the zeitgeist…
The trouble is, if you've got a really good local e.g. Greek place near you, they could now be in competition with a bigger name brand like The Athenian. If the local gets run out of town, that's another empty unit.
It might be a hot take but I feel like these mass delivery businesses create more bad than good for a society. Do we really need to be able to choose from 800+ options of overpriced generic food? And for what? It causes higher prices for everyone (unsurprisingly, when you need 5 different actors to earn something), it drags food standards down, it congests cycle lanes with thousands of delivery riders using illegal bikes and ignoring traffic rules. It probably also promotes staying at home too much but I'm already feeling like an old man shouting at cloud at this point so let's not go down this lane :)
Not a hot take, just a reasonable one! It's such an unnecessarily complex system (and fairly exploitative to people like the drivers) it dilutes value everywhere - not to mention how it dilutes what should be a joyful experience ~ to "eat out"
Amazing reporting as always.
Another angle on this is the impact on local high streets. Where we live, the high street is all burger and chicken shops. I can't imagine that the local area is sustaining that number of slightly different chicken shops, so this must be being sustained through deliveries. The result has been a local high street that offers little for local people
This is essentially just a variation on franchising; instead of buying into a whole, recognisable brand from the products on sale to the name above the door, it's simply local businesses providing a service to those with bigger, wider brand recognition. It is obviously leading to a degree of homogeneity, though, but if customers don't care that much, they'll get the quality of food they deserve.
Sorry, but this is just wrong - and with all due respect, I don't trust a French place churning out American ribs in the evening. And in line with a previous commenter, I am very concerned about allergen cross-contamination - I'm allergic to fish & seafood, so I won't even eat at a "Kebab & Chippie" because I don't trust them to avoid getting fish remnants on chips or a kebab. When Deliveroo started out, it was really nice because you could get really good food without having to call, but since it's exploded I only ever order from places that I genuinely know to be actual restaurants in my area. There isn't a Dishoom in my area, so I will find another great Indian restaurant, or go to the actual Dishoom restaurant.
For £15 you can go somewhere local and eat something genuinely nice! I'll never understand the obsession with delivered food that is inevitably luke-warm, mediocre, and still somehow expensive
Great article. Worrying that this trend will allow big brands to flood an area and force out independent competition, ironically using their kitchens to do it
I invest (small amounts) in lots of smaller, early stage businesses, typically through the two main platforms (Republic and CrowdCube). Over five year ago Peckwater Brands launched the host kitchen idea and (through various later investment raises) have seen their value 20x. It is fair to say that they a) have been doing this a lot longer than a year, and b) have been leaders in this in London.
PS I also invested in (cough) Really Local Group as loved that idea. Thanks for your piece on that, always great to surface things!
Re the restaurants story: surely it should be a 'hamburger of doom', not a harbinger of doom?
This makes me think of car parts. The best-quality components are the ones from the manufacturer, produced to the highest standards and priced accordingly, but in most cases they're actually manufactured by a third party and you can get a bargain by buying a "generic" part that's come off the same production line but had the official logo scraped off. I wonder if some host kitchens will end up surreptitiously selling white-label versions of the branded meals for less.