Virtual restaurant

And you know, it's really interesting on that point.

I opened the first franchised ghost kitchen for Wingstop.

So ghost kitchens are delivery only locations.

It was a concept created kind of around COVID where someone would buy a warehouse, create 40 small kitchens.

People would share some common resources like walk-in coolers, storage areas, cleaning resources, stuff like that.

And that was far and away the most challenging location for us to operate.

And I think a huge part of it is that no customers have eyes on what's happening in the four walls of your little kitchen.

And so if the cleanliness is terrible and food quality is suffering, if they're mixing up bags, the feedback loop actually is quite long and also involves two new parties, your delivery partner and the ghost kitchen operator on was the bag handed off right? Did somebody spill it? Did it sit out too long? All this other stuff.

And I said, what if I became your partner? And there was all this conversation around ghost kitchens at the time.

So I ended up getting into business and created a ghost kitchen and licensed all these brands, well-known brands that I'll leave nameless at the time, but they were, they were rather established.

And we started to create with their menus, um, basically lunch orders for people that were going into the office.

Creating a ghost kitchen in 2020 was not opportune.

Security guards were not letting delivery folks up into the buildings.

Most people had not gone back to the office.

I think in the first year of business, we did like a million three in revenue, which was nothing to be upset at but i saw the writing on the wall for us to really grow and be like a sizable business we needed capital and i wasn't very good at raising money or not good at all raising money um and i realized that that the op the operating business was a very different model than i was when i was con then operating a business right a service business And so I ended up at a loss selling my shares back to the original owner.

So I had tried the Ghost Kitchen model.

Is that a Goldbelly competitor or is it a...

Is it like a ghost kitchens storefront sort of things where you can, they have the actual kitchens, like they would have one in Austin, they would have one in Charlotte, they're making them there and you can door dash? Correct.

Or is it Gold Belly where it's all made from the flagship and then they ship it out?

No, it'll be the former.

We opened three ghost kitchens during the pandemic and every single one of them failed.

College Avenue, Sports Arena, Barrio Logan.

In this video, I'm gonna explain why we did it, what we learned along the way, and what you can do instead.

But from the failures, lessons are learned.

And if you're strong enough to keep going, hopefully us sharing these secrets will help you from making the same mistakes that we did.

Let's talk about Ghost Kitchens.

Why did we get into Ghost Kitchens, what we learned from them, and what you can do from our lessons.

We opened up Ghost Kitchens during the pandemic because that was the cool thing to do.

Hot or not, here we go.

Is Ghost Kitchens, are Ghost Kitchens hot or not?

Oh,

hot.

She's just happy to be here.

100%.

I think the one thing I would ask you about is, I think, Shet, the first one was Ghost Kitchens.

Yes.

But it's a rarity, not the norm.

Right, so I would imagine there was this other upending thing called COVID, right, where you realize that, oh, I guess we could have these ghost kitchens.

We don't even need a storefront in some cases, right, if we have certain types of food.

And then now that location's almost kind of a variable depending on kind of the takeout models that you have.

And if it ever goes through something like that again, it will never survive because no one knew what to do.

But the restaurant industry, like always, found a way to build sales back.

And that was the virtual brands and the ghost kitchens and everything else.

I mean, we did drive-thrus in the parking lot of brick and mortar with no drive-thrus where people came up.

And the vision of the company is really to ultimately deploy tens of millions of robots in the U.S. and over time over the world.

And of course, we started manufacturing and then we'll over time get to kind of more central production kitchens, like, for example, ghost kitchens, commissaries, things like that, and ultimately to day-to-day commercial kitchens, right? So fast casuals, prisons, hotels, stadiums, things like that.

Yeah, that was one of the things I thought was really clever about the materials I saw in your company.

That was a few years ago.

And so one of the things that I did is like, I literally reached out to every different food robotics founder I could talk to, to just like talk to them.

What happened? And some of them did work, right? But generally, most of them did not work.

So like, what happened? And what could I learn from it? And then obviously spend as much time with customers as I could, right? So we did talk to a lot of people in fast casuals and ghost kitchens.

Like Travis had just announced it from... who's Uber and had started cloud kitchens and was doing his own food robotics thing.