Covid or not, Ghost kitchens breathe new life into entrepreneurial souls

Lockdown diaries would be incomplete without mentioning our “ghost kitchen” saviours who continue to feed millions of newbies challenged by regular household chores in these dire times. However trivial it may sound, the struggle is real for many who would relate with it.

Even when groceries and vegetable supplies were biting the dust, when cooking lessons looked absolutely necessary and most of us needed time to master the intricate skills, our delivery heroes fought all the risks to support the food network and continue to do so, marking significant overhaul to the broken supply chain so that customers could rely on them.

Much before the pandemic, our country had witnessed steep growth in digital ordering with food tech players like Swiggy & Zomato growing remarkably faster than dine-in restaurants.

In seeking to optimize this trend, Ghost Kitchens and Virtual Restaurants have emerged as 21st century innovations which have an opportunity to establish themselves as part of the industry.

Ghost kitchens are physical facilities that “virtual brands” rent to produce their product while virtual restaurants are a similar kind but do not rent facilities from third parties as they have their own, often well-established locations and use their kitchens to produce delivery-exclusive menus.

Lockdown Diaries-2020

In my own society, we are amazed by the altruism and dedication shown by one of the residents who has been cooking and serving at least 60 houses in the neighbourhood since the past one month. Truly it’s no less than God’s work for many society dwellers. Due to restrictions in movement, the entire set up was supported from their home itself, yet they took up this noble cause despite dealing with personal anxiety and domestic duties.

Inspired by them, another family rose up to the demand and started offering a slightly different menu to cater to multiple tastes. With more than two months of confinement, for a lot of us, it’s like feasting everyday on delicious food without having to step out to give some kick to our palate, for others it’s regular food available at an additional cost.

I agree this is reducing our dependence on cooks and domestic helpers in a great way. Even in the post-pandemic era, wherein majority of us would be conditioned to keep outsiders away from our safe abodes, this alternate channel of food delivery will take care of our occasional cravings as well as our basic nutritional supply.

As the concept of “virtual kitchens” gains popularity over WhatsApp, there’s a bigger use case awaiting design intervention to organise the endless chat messages between the order takers and the order receivers. While Whatsapp contributes to 60-70% sale followed by referrals for very early starters with no website or app yet, scaling up for accommodating higher, ad-hoc, custom orders would mean some sort of automation in data management in order to avoid human errors get the better of all the hard work that goes into gaining customer’s trust and building a long lasting relationship.

How to scale a ghost kitchen?

The other day I saw a few customers queuing outside the kitchen owner’s house to collect their takeaways and some looked confused as their parcels had been collected already by another family member. This not only interrupted the otherwise seamless take out experience but also aroused doubt for the kitchen owner.

The already understaffed owner-chef-packer in this pandemic situation surely needs something more robust than Whatsapp to track details of orders and payments apart from providing personalised support served by WhatsApp group/private chats.

Perhaps we could think of something as simple as a Typeform interface that gathers daily orders from individual customers and provides easy to interpret variables to process customer requests without having the need to manually sort the same. It could be a one stop shop for the seller as well as the customer that could incorporate other key information like slot preferences, past order feedback and payment mode.

In fact Typeform allows digital payment APIs to easily integrate with the form at no additional cost. Not only would it take the burden of analysing the customer database and forecast business growth but would also help amateur entrepreneurs/ first-timers to stay ahead in the game of logistics, especially with continued uncertainty looming over nation wide supply chains.

Also, my focus here is on the ad-hoc food ordering services, that do not necessarily think of a long term business outcome. And it’s more like a contingency plan tapping on to this potential opportunity of meeting daily food requirements. For them, an app or a website would mean overhead costs and lead to prices going up, not so favourable when someone were to win the customers’ hearts and ensure repeatability of orders.

How to be ahead of the game and personalise customer interactions?

The above example illustrates how one could enliven Human Experience using a simple Typeform interface.

Although, having proposed Typeform or any online form as a solution to bring some order to the chaos, it’s worth considering that not all vendors/ customers might be grappling with these challenges. For a lot of kitchen owners, trust might be the key player to push all other issues into hindsight, which may not arise in the first place.

With the lockdown season getting perpetual in nature, the gig economy seems sure to ride the WFH wave. And with unemployment on the rise, we may actually witness community businesses giving some boost to the falling economy.

It would be interesting to vouch for well designed tools (Typeform was an example above) with free accessibility and easy usability to come at everyone’s disposal, so that skill is no longer a deterrent when it comes to wearing the “entrepreneur's” hat.