Chefs working in a kitchen

Why Are We Seeing The Disappearance Of Ghost Kitchens?

NEWS

By ELIAS NASH

By the end of 2020, 51% of restaurants used a ghost kitchen. While many saw them as the industry's future, today they're going out of business with their cons outweighing the pros.
For starters, ghost kitchens may cut down costs on space and staff, but they face steep third-party fees. Food apps may charge up to 10% on top of up to 30% delivery apps charge.
Customers have also found ghost kitchens deceitful. A Reddit post in 2020, for example, posted how they ordered from one such kitchen thinking it was local business but it was not.
A 2023 National Restaurant Association report found that 70% of diners value a "publicly accessible, physical location" when ordering food. To customers, transparency matters.
Ghost kitchens can also be troublesome for quality control, particularly for local health departments. There have
been many instances of quality
regulation breaches across the U.S.
Delivery apps have also begun to strike back at the ghost kitchens. In March 2023, Uber Eats announced it would be wiping roughly 5,000 virtual businesses from its platform.
The strike was largely due to a surge in identical offerings. Meanwhile, more diners are returning to eating in person due to the high fees associated with delivery.