Vancouver residents David and Amber Kennedy were looking for something new when they decided to order delivery on a recent evening, so after browsing through the DoorDash app they settled on a place neither of them had heard of before: Coco’s Famous Hamburgers.
“We wanted some cool eclectic new local burger company,” Amber Kennedy said.
But when the food arrived, the Kennedys said they found that the burgers looked and tasted eerily familiar — specifically, they seemed a lot like burgers the couple had eaten in the past at the restaurant chain Shari’s.
David Kennedy began to research the Coco’s brand and quickly discovered that they had unknowingly ordered from what the DoorDash app refers to as a “virtual brand,” also commonly called a ghost kitchen.
The phrase refers to restaurant listings on delivery apps that don’t exist as standalone brick-and-mortar businesses, but instead prepare their food in existing commercial kitchens at other restaurants.
In some cases, the virtual kitchens are independent businesses or separate brands under the same business, with different menus. But in other cases, they’re essentially just an alternate name for the host restaurant, offering largely the same food selection.
The Kennedys aren’t the only Vancouver residents to encounter new virtual kitchens. A post last week on the Vancouver board of the social network Reddit included a picture of three different nearby restaurant listings on DoorDash — Chicken Sammy’s, The Wing Dept. and Fresh Set — that in fact all operate out of kitchens at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Brews.
Chuck E. Cheese is another prominent example — the company made headlines during the early months of the pandemic when customers discovered that it was selling its pizza for delivery under the name Pasqually’s Pizza and Wings.
The Pasqually’s page on DoorDash refers to it as “a concept by CEC Entertainment, Inc., owner and operator of Chuck E. Cheese,” but most of the other Vancouver-area listings don’t include the name of the parent restaurant, only a small notice that the business is a virtual kitchen.
That’s the part that David and Amber Kennedy said left them with a bad taste after the Coco’s experience — the fact that they felt like they weren’t told up front that they were essentially ordering from Shari’s, which David Kennedy described as “anti-consumer.”
“If I wanted a Shari’s hamburger, I’d order a Shari’s hamburger,” Amber Kennedy added.
Various formats
The exact nature of a virtual kitchen can vary between businesses. Coco’s, for example, is a real place — although not in Oregon or Washington. Coco’s Bakery is a chain of eateries in California and Arizona and was purchased by Shari’s parent company in 2018.
The “Famous Hamburgers” part of the name appears to be a new addition for delivery apps, but the business uses a similar logo and appears to cast itself as the same brand — the Famous Hamburgers website uses the tagline “making every day burger day since 1948,” which is the same year the Coco’s Bakery franchise was founded.
But in Washington, at least, it operates as a virtual kitchen. When the Kennedys tracked their order on DoorDash, it showed the delivery car departing from what appeared to be the Shari’s near Vancouver Mall.
Shari’s did not reply to a request for comment.
In other cases, the brands are purely virtual and appear to overlap at least partially with the regular restaurant’s menu lineup. An “Avo-Cobb-O” salad can be ordered from either Red Robin or Fresh Set, with the exact same result.
In a statement, Red Robin CEO Paul Murphy referred to the company’s alternate listings as “delivery-only brands,” and said their menu selections are partially pulled from the Red Robin menu but also feature a mix of new offerings.
“We are pleased that these new concepts were well-received by our guests in our recent test,” he wrote in an email. “As a result, we have recently started a national rollout.”
Murphy added that Red Robin plans to continue to invest in the delivery brands, including by adding new menu items for each one.
Virtual kitchens emerge
The concept of shared commercial kitchens isn’t a new one. Mark Matthias, who operates Beaches Restaurant in Vancouver and a second location at Portland International Airport, said he hadn’t heard about bigger brands using alternate names on delivery apps, but he said shared kitchens are a common innovation in places where space is tight.
“There’s airports that run kitchens like that, where they create two or three concepts but they’re all coming out of the same kitchen,” he said. “But it’s a new brand that they’ve created just out of that kitchen.”
Anthony Anton, president of the Washington Hospitality Association, described the concept as a natural evolution of the restaurant industry in response to changing consumer trends.
The past two decades have seen an increasingly large shift toward carry-out and prepared food, he said, driven by a tendency among generations X and onward to order out more often and cut down on the time spent preparing meals at home.
Virtual kitchens became far more common once COVID-19 supercharged the delivery food market, but the idea was already around and “was growing for a while,” Anton said, driven by restaurants trying to get more value out of their facilities, particularly if there were times of day when they weren’t running at full capacity.
“The concept is if I’m only producing X out of my kitchen, how can I attract other customers?” he said. “If I already have all the ingredients, all the makings, all the staff there in the building, how can I take advantage of that to survive?”
The concept has been building for a while, but it’s still new enough that there isn’t really any standardized approach, Anton added — it’s still the “Wild West,” and it’s also tough to predict how the end of the pandemic will impact the nascent virtual kitchen lineup.
“I think it’s going to be interesting to see,” he said. “You know, one day we’re going to be normal. When restaurants are at full capacity again, will people keep ghost kitchens or will they fade because kitchens are performing at full capacity again?”
