DoorDash Opens Ghost Kitchen

Food delivery service DoorDash has launched a shared commissary kitchen — a ghost kitchen called DoorDash Kitchens — where restaurants will prepare meals to be delivered or for pickup without being a place where people go to eat.

The ghost kitchen, which is in Redwood City, California, is the first of its kind for DoorDash. Restaurants that will prepare food at the facility include a mixture of national brands and local restaurants, including Nation’s Giant Hamburgers, Rooster & Rice, Humphry Slocombe and The Halal Guys.

According to DoorDash, the facility will give those restaurants access to new customers in neighboring communities without the overhead involved in expanding their brick-and-mortar stores. 

For an undisclosed slice of the delivery profits, DoorDash provides the infrastructure, marketing and last-mile logistics for the restaurants, and also has worked with them to design their DoorDash Kitchens space to meet their needs.

"We found the notion of a delivery-only kitchen in Redwood City very appealing, as it helps us test out demand in new markets, reaching new customers and areas quickly," Rooster & Rice Chief Financial Officer Min Park said in a statement.

DoorDash Kitchens provides on-demand delivery from its restaurants to customers in seven Bay Area markets: Atherton, Belmont, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Carlos and Woodside. Pickup options are available to customers in those suburbs, as well as customers in Burlingame, Foster City, Los Altos, Mountain View, San Mateo and Sunnyvale.

So far, the California location is the only one DoorDash has unveiled, but as a concept, ghost kitchens — also called virtual or cloud kitchens or virtual eateries — are hot. Their popularity has grown thanks to the increasing demand for takeout food that is quick and of high quality, JLL reports.

For property owners, the facilities can be advantageous. Ghost kitchens can often be set up in spaces that typically go unused, such as basements or parking areas. They can also be located in industrial space, since those sites offer easier access for delivery drivers compared with standard retail space.

DoorDash was founded in the Bay Area in 2013 and is now the largest food delivery service, Edison Trends reports. As of the first half of September, DoorDash led the competition with 35% market share of consumer spending, followed by UberEats at 25% and Grubhub at 23%.