Say you want to eat steaks tonight. You go to your fancy restaurant, and order up your $50 filet mignon. The waiter put in the order on his terminal, and it gets relayed to a cloud kitchen 5 miles away.
There, the order is received. A Food Technician pull out the raw meat, cook it, then package it for delivery inside a heating container to keep the food warm.
Then, it is handed off to an Uber driver to deliver it to the restaurant. Delivery time is about 7 minutes.
The restaurant receives the food, and the local food technician unpackages it, does a final Quality Control check to make sure it’s not raw, and is cooked to specifications, then he re-plates it on a nice plate, with some garnish for the final touch.
Your filet mignon is now served, to your exacting specifications: medium rare. Along with an expensive bottle of vintage red wine.
Same goes for any other fancy restaurant, serving say seafood linguini, or anything else. It’s cooked at a food factory, and delivered to your plate, hot to the touch. You wouldn’t even know the difference.
And in the future, instead of using an Uber driver, the food will be delivered by aerial delivery drones. Over time, you’ll end up seeing drones criss crossing the skies above a city, just delivering hot and freshly prepared meals to fancy restaurants and eateries.
No more need for the restaurant to hire a dedicated cook. Instead, they’ll use the services of a centralized cook, that is busy every single minute.
Then, over time, even the cloud kitchen cooks will get automated out, and replaced with a robotic cook. And the cloud kitchen will hire a Quality Control technician to watch over the cooking robots.
Then the entire process is automated. The food packaging technician is replaced with a food packaging robot. Then the food package is automatically attached to the delivery drone, and sent off. Then it lands at the restaurant on a specialized receiving platform, which accepts the food package, and puts it on a shelf for the waiter to pick up, and serve to the customer.
Dystopian indeed. Perfect for the post-pandemic world.
These are rental spaces, just like almost every restaurant in the world operates out of. How is it a sweatshop or anything close to a franchise if someone starts their own restaurant under their own brand with their own menu and rents kitchen space to work/deliver out of?
>That "Cloud Kitchens" enterprise is a dystopian horror show, too. It means that Kalanick and the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund own the first part of restaurant take-out -- the menu and online ordering; they own the third part -- delivery; and now they also own the second part -- actually making the food. The "restaurant", at that point, is just a brand logo. Their sweatshops make the same food for everybody and paste whatever name on it. The restaurant isn't even a franchise at that point. It's a sticker.