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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

For those that haven't been following this, CloudKitchens[0] is a still somewhat stealth "startup". It was started by Travis Kalanick (of Uber fame) and he has been doing a fairly good job keeping it hidden[1].

[0] https://www.cloudkitchens.com/

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/769409f1-fb0b-4761-b2aa-e75b9792c...

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Fwiw, the guy who wrote this article is ex-Uber and was involved in Policy and Strategy for Uber India. Probably has privileged access to Kalanick’s new venture.

It's a company that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, has a known name, known business model and has had articles written about it. Not sure how anyone can consider it "stealth".

Here's hoping they can keep the culture from being as toxic as Uber's was under his tenure.

Wonder if one part of their secret sauce will be skirting health code.

Do you mean the kitchen skirting codes or the tenants?

I don't know that much about health codes, but my guess is that they are not expensive to follow beyond the cost of having suitable equipment, which is something they probably won't be able to avoid.

Health codes in saner municipalities which are the municipalities occupied with people that have the most disposable income are extremely expensive to follow as they dictate enormous number of variables, ranging from what can be stored and how to what kind of cooking process one must follow.

For example, AC banned partially pre-cooking of poultry around 2012(?) at which point Revel's restaurant had to can its most ordered and one of the most profitable dishes as its guests were not interested in waiting for nearly an hour for a chicken to be cooked from scratch. They used to partially cook it, stick it into the fridge, wait for the order and finish cooking it in ~15-20 minutes. It was a total disaster for the restaurant.

Interesting re-framing of this sort of operation as 'Dark Kitchens' which facilitate worker abuse in this discussion on Trashfuture:

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-iaxgv-e4084a?utm_camp...

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