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Comment by blackearl | Hacker News Reader

There are a few "restaurants" near me that don't have any brick-and-mortar presence. The food they offer suspiciously looks like what you could get at your grocery's frozen food section. I'm not a fan of this model as I've seen it so far. You don't need much, you can have the Domino's style food counter and a stool (aka don't eat here, go outside), but not having a real storefront rubs me the wrong way.

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A YouTuber successfully became a verified Deliveroo selling microwave meals https://youtu.be/k47u9tduwb8

I'm not surprised at all given the people supposed to verify restaurants' applications are most likely the same monkeys that run their customer service (outsourced of course, what a surprise).

Most restaurants that have a storefront (just about all the big chains) also serve reheated frozen food.

It does beg the question about accountability in the case of poor quality food or foodborne illness.

A big reason for that is that they probably are made the same way; an automated factory line that has no way of fitting into a strip mall lot can easily do so in the warehouse district; after all a factory is architecturally a warehouse with machinery inside. As such I can see an incentive to take a factory setup for frozen $2 burritos and strip out the flash-freezer, leaving you with the perfect ghost kitchen setup for "El Cactus Organica"

I feel like you'd never get the volume out of a factory location (even a centralized one) to justify the production capacity of industrial food production equipment, at least not as it exists today. There are some startups that seem to at least be trying to bridge this gap with smaller-scale food production automation.

A storefront means the owner has investment and thus incentive to succeed. Lacking that, risks cold be smaller and thus success is less important.

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