A cloud kitchen is a commercial kitchen that has no dining room and cooks only for delivery orders. It is also called a dark kitchen, a ghost kitchen or a delivery-only kitchen. Customers never visit it. They see only a restaurant's name, logo and menu on a food delivery app.
Why build a kitchen with no tables? A dining room needs a street-front building, furniture, waiters and a high rent. A kitchen that only delivers can sit in a back lane or a basement, where rent is much lower. And because no one sees it, one kitchen can cook for several brands at once. A multi-brand cloud kitchen may sell biryani, pizza and wraps under three different names, from the same room.
Software does three jobs in a cloud kitchen.
First, it decides which brands to run in which neighbourhood. Delivery app data shows what people in an area search for and order.
Second, it standardises the recipes, so that each dish tastes the same in every kitchen of the chain. A screen at each cooking station shows the weight of every ingredient, the order of the steps and the cooking time.
Third, it times the cooking to the moment the rider arrives. Food that waits on the counter goes cold or soggy.
Say a cloud kitchen in Thane receives an order for a paneer wrap at 8:10 p.m., through its online order aggregator. The delivery app reports that the rider will arrive at 8:22. The wrap takes 6 minutes to cook and 1 minute to pack. So the kitchen screen holds the order, and tells the cook to start at 8:15. The screen also shows the recipe: 90 g of paneer, 30 g of onion and 20 ml of mint chutney. The wrap is sealed in its box at 8:22, as the rider walks in. If the cook had started at once, the wrap would have waited 5 minutes on the counter.
Each order is billed and counted on the kitchen's restaurant POS. From these sales, demand forecasting predicts how much paneer, rice and chicken to buy for each day, and how many cooks each shift needs.
A cloud kitchen depends on the delivery apps for nearly all its customers, and pays them a commission on every order. So some cloud kitchen companies have built their own ordering apps, in which a customer can order from all their brands in one order.
How is it different from a normal restaurant that also delivers? A normal restaurant cooks mainly for its tables, and delivery is extra. A cloud kitchen has only delivery, so every part of it, from the location to the menu, is planned for the rider. The next step is ten-minute food delivery, where the food is partly cooked before anyone orders it.