That delicious burrito bowl you ordered in last night? It might have been made in a production line along with everyone else’s pizzas, burgers, salads and sushi. Welcome to the future of food.
There’s a kitchen in Brooklyn that fries and grills and bakes the food for some of the city’s most profitable home-delivery restaurants. These outfits have anonymous, inconspicuous-sounding names: Leafage will bring you salads, Butcher Block will turn up with sandwiches, Mac Royale and Melt 350 will deliver all the cheese-related products you could possibly eat, and Authentic’s menu is full of quinoa bowls. They’ve recently started making veggie bowls studded with raw fish to satisfy the city’s collective greed for Hawaiian-style poke.
These restaurants have Instagram and Facebook accounts. They respond to you on social media. And when an obliging man on a delivery bike turns up at your door he’s brandishing branded cups and cutlery. These businesses have a footprint, you can see and touch and eat from them. They’re restaurants, just like any other restaurant.
Except that they’re not. They’re all – plus a handful more – operated out of that kitchen by a parent company called Green Summit, founded in 2013 and churning out more than 7,500 meals a week to the tune of $30 million profit last year. All those restaurants are ghost restaurants: delivery-only businesses with no storefront and no dine-in option. A team of chefs and line workers produce food across multiple categories, which is packaged up and then sent out to hungry people across the city. Green Summit’s mission is to streamline and monetize a particular corner of the big business of home delivery.
And it could be the future of the way we eat.
Ghost restaurants first started popping up when home delivery aggregators, like Seamless and GrubHub, sprang into existence a few years ago. It was bound to happen: these sites were cornering the takeout market, making serious money for the restaurants they featured. Seamless alone served $2.4 billion worth of food in 2015 alone.
So it’s not surprising that ghost restaurants might want to muscle in on this lucrative territory. All of these newfound businesses, however, focused on operating like a traditional restaurant: providing one menu, one brand identity, one cuisine, just without opening a storefront or a traditional dine-in space. Even David Chang, the celebrity chef behind ramen bar Momofuku, is in on the business. His company Maple delivers restaurant-quality modern fusion food direct to your door/mouth without having to pay rent for a dine-in space. Green Summit doubles down on this mission statement, running a number of ghost restaurants out of the same kitchen, with 200 staff pumping out 600 lunches and 600 dinners every day. You’d be hard pressed to find a traditional restaurant doing those kinds of covers.
If you want to try something new – say, a poke bar – you can, all without hiring new staff, finding real estate to rent and formulating a social media plan. You just teach your line staff how to cut sashimi and start adding it to the veggie bowls they were already making for your other concepts. When Green Summit started a sushi restaurant, they learned how to make the rolls by watching videos on YouTube. “Quinoa bowls – I had that epiphany in the morning and we launched in the afternoon,” Schatzberg told Crains New York.
Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to happen. When you’ve got this many balls in the air, mistakes are bound to occur. Diners have left blistering reviews of Green Summit restaurants, telling of receiving cold, overpriced food or, even worse, a meal from the wrong ghost restaurant, sent to you by mistake.
So could this be the future? It all sounds great in theory. Making it work in practice is the hard part.