How Deliveroo's 'dark kitchens' are catering from car parks

In my view, the problem is that "local restaurants" have to pay very high rent if they want to be close enough to their customers to support delivery. It's the same problem if you want to be a janitor -- it costs too much to live near where you work. This in turn limits Deliveroo's business, if there are not enough restaurants within delivery distance of a potential customer base.

So perhaps the problem statement is that janitors are willing to commute long distances, but hot food isn't.

To answer your first question: it's a better experience. Local restaurants have terrible websites with no photos and sketchy payment forms. Their delivery usually involves having cash for a tip. If there's a problem with your order, it's unlikely it'll be resolved.

With services like Deliveroo and others, your payment information is managed by a central third party, delivery quality is generally quite good, you get ETAs for your food, there's real customer support, the app/site is modern and easy to use with pictures and search, and you never need to keep cash on hand.

If every local restaurant had a system as effective as Domino's, I could see these services being in trouble. But that will almost certainly never be the case.

In London, before Deliveroo, we had Just Eat and Hungryhouse (and we still do). I would say that the big difference between those two and Deliveroo for consumers is the selection of restaurants: the former offer a huge array of 'normal' takeaways - Indian, Chinese, Thai, pizza, that sort of thing. Deliveroo has fancy stuff - hipster burger places, my local high-end 'modern British' restaurant, the nice sandwich deli down the hill (who offer a roast beef sandwich with "incredibly slutty gravy mayo"). I remember when i realised that i could punch some buttons on my computer and get a fresh crèpe Suzette delivered (from Le Mercury in Islington, i think).

(That said, looking on Deliveroo now, i see a lot of the usual suspects (including such not-quite-so-high-end options as KFC and Papa John's), so perhaps the perception is greater than the reality.)

I think that market differentiation goes hand-in-hand with owning the delivery infrastructure, because those high-end restaurants don't have their own delivery infrastructure. Delivery isn't part of the business model of a high-end sit-down restaurant, or part of the core competency of the people running a hipster burger startup (cooking and managing the Instagram account at the same time is hard enough!). Pure information brokers like Just Eat can't get you food from those places, but logistics operators like Deliveroo can.

I suspect this is why the existing platforms didn't do this - they already have complicated businesses built around the information bit, and didn't want to take on the complexity of also running logistics.

As for why this is worth 900 megabucks, well, that's easy: interest rates are at record lows, and there are tax breaks on venture capital.

The niche here is that they get to bake the costs of things like rent and taxes out of the cost of goods sold.

I’m sure that these places get to skimp on safety regulations and other external scrutiny. If a kitchen only has a little space heater, there’s almost certainly a bunch of other shitty behavior that is probably illegal. If it’s mobile, I have no doubt that they “forget” to record revenue on the production side.

My old super in LA did this for a while too, before becoming a super. Much of the high-end 'catering' is done in apartments all over LA. I liked him a lot, but never asked about what the health inspector thought of the 3 cats.

From what I have heard from restaurateur friends - it's very difficult to have high quality food that was not prepared immediately before serving. So it is not as simple as plating it.

Online delivery supermarkets have made the same realisation (so-called dark stores), but a few years earlier.

Feels like New York, where space has long been at an extreme premium, figured this out a long time ago with take out and delivery joints.

Counterpoint: all the delivery services around me that prepared their own food (spoonrocket, bento, spring) seem to have gone out of business. Munchery is still around but I hear it's gone way downhill, and they don't deliver hot food anyway.

When I was living in Lindon I regularly ordered from hungryhouse. On my way home from work I always walked past a sleezy place which sells asian food, had never any people in and the house looked really badly maintained. Only after a few orders and walking past this place I realize I ordered from them a few times.

After seeing the place and making the connection I never ordered again from there.

It definitely made me realize that I pick food differently for delivery than I do eating out.

There's a few places that specialize in that sort of thing: https://www.fastcompany.com/3064075/hold-the-storefront-how-...

> and the only difference is wheels and an engine.

and planning permission, and hygiene inspection.

That is fine as long as people know that the food they ordered was cooked in a parking lot or similar and not in an upscale restaurant.

I think the issue is the general race to the bottom in working conditions. People don't necessarily want to support a business that keeps the staff in too hot / cold metal boxes all evening. It's certainly not what they expect from a nice restaurant.

According to the Daily Mail (which, granted...) those listings say they're "Deliveroo Editions". I couldn't find an example on the site, though.

From the article:

> Dan Warne, Deliveroo’s UK and Ireland managing director, admits the company did not move quickly enough to speak to the council and residents in Southwark, but says Roobox kitchens are clean, hygienic and checked by the Food Standards Agency.

I think that this is a close you can get to lying to the customers without actually lying.

Uber eats charges ~35% to restaurants in australia.

I'm curious, do restaurant kitchens usually have exterior windows? My mental image of them (surely mostly from TV) is not of a place with plenty of natural light.

> How dystopian

You're objecting to an aesthetic, not frankly anything of substance. Very few restaurant kitchens are particularly pleasant places to work, often cramped (because they take up square feet in prime real estate) and very hot. Three staff in a container seems comparatively spacious.

Also, when The Guardian struggles to find other fault than temperature and lack of appropriate council permits, that's about as strong a confirmation of adequate working conditions you're likely to find.

> How dystopian.

What exactly seems dystopian?

The author sure was trying hard to dramatize these micro kitchens, describing them in commically over-the-top ways - "dark kitchens" near highway overpasses evokes thoughts of secret interrogation sites. But what actual, tangible aspects of these kitchens seems dystopian or bad?

Overall they seem like a great trend. Small-scale infill development can reduce traffic and pollution while also creating a better experience for restaurant customers - more food available with faster delivery times.

It does sound like in at least one case planning regulations were not being accurately followed. That's not good. And maybe some kitchen environments weren't very good. Individual restaurants violating labor laws should be punished, and/or regulations should be updated if there are special considerations needed for these micro-kitchens. (The lack of windows though is probably because they need to use wall space for storage and equipment and not a way to save money; it's also not necessarily a big deal in a small building if you can leave the door open.)

At the end of the day I'm just not seeing how urban infill micro-kitchens are a terrible dystopian trend.

Have you worked in a fast food kitchen? Or any restaurant kitchen? It's windowless and greasy and often surrounded by a parking lot close to a busy road.

I also had classes as a child in buildings called 'portables' which look pretty similar to these things, except with windows and a normal classroom interior.