I remember seeing a journalist a few years ago demonstrating, tongue in cheek, how there is zero vetting of restaurents. He set up an account as a restaurent, put up a barbecue in front of his house on the same day and got an acquaintance to order from him. Driver showed up shortly afterwards to pick up the food (which had been dropped on the floor to make a point for the camera), no questions asked.
They're happy to run marketing campaigns about "Food Freedom" [1], but it seems like it's old "we're just a platform" selectively applied when it suits them.
From the video description:
> The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.
I'm assuming they have a per-user metric of overall profit and mine ended up being in the negative so it makes sense from a business point of view. However, I would be worried about their business if they can't properly deliver enough orders to make a profit when someone is holding them accountable.
The business model appears to be based on fobbing the customer off and letting them hold the bag should things go wrong, which is sadly a common thing in large-scale VC-funded startups.
Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working environment, not necessarily anyway.
I don't advocate for bad working conditions, but it must be hard for anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen to keep a straight face when reading that. Even many Michelin starred kitchens are horrible environments.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k...
Edit: This isn't meant to be whataboutism, just pointing out that a "ghost kitchen" is only really different from a normal kitchen in its business structure. By and large, catering is not, and has never been, a glamorous industry. If you want to stop kitchens being difficult places to work, that's a worthwhile cause, but much, much bigger than Deliveroo.
Focusing on a poor correlation is not solving the core problem.
Often times these kitchens are anonymous looking from the outside, often located outside of the town centre
In the UK they should be beholden to the same hygiene standards as any other food preparation business
Some of these kitchens have their own branding and are not associated with a restaurant, but if you know your local area and see some restaurants which you don’t recognise on deliveroo or the other food delivery services, it’s possible that they are a ghost kitchen.
This makes it very hard for an established restaurant to compete on-line - from outside, the five real restaurants in your neighbourhood look no different than 20 "virtual" restaurants. There's no way to tell. In this reality, as a customer, I have to resign to expect completely random results when I try to order food. These are also perfect conditions for a race to the bottom.
> Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards.
Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Further, traditional restaurants are also running multiple virtual restaurants (e.g. one menu for katsu curry, and another for sushi).
Perhaps not. And yes, I know there's a supply chain. But every restaurant I've been to - or ordered from - where I live[0], each one has its own distinct and consistent style. For instance, being a pizza aficionado, I could tell you just by looking and tasting, which restaurant you ordered a pizza from in the town I now live, and which major pizza parlor[1] you ordered from in Kraków (the city I spent most of my life in).
This is what I'm concerned about. While not perfect, the restaurant's name was something you could use to "hash" a particular style of a particular dish by. They may have all supplied themselves at few well-known wholesalers[2], but they each processed the ingredients differently. Ghost kitchens + "virtual restaurants" kill that mechanism.
To be clear: I don't mind the concept of ghost kitchens per se. Done well (i.e. regulated well), they'll be able to deliver consistent quality at good price. My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants.
Something like this has already happened with consumer goods - so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands. Consumer's ability to use branding as a proxy for quality (or quality of support) has been destroyed, DDoSed by the proliferation of such transient brands. I consider this a loss to customers and to the market at large (it increases information asymmetry). I worry the same is about to happen with food delivery.
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[0] - I love my country for being just enough developed to get all the fun stuff conceived in the US, but just enough not developed that they come with a delay of a few years - giving us time to see the expected social impact things will have :).
[1] - At least until recently. Now there's too many small operators offering delivery services to track - but I can still distinguish between the ~6-8 places I used to order from. When these small operators started showing up, many of them were delivery-only, so I suspect they may have graduated to ghost kitchen frontends by now.
[2] - Or discount supermarkets :). My wife and I have a bunch of stories about it. Notably, I remember once being in the queue behind a couple who were buying the entire stock of chicken breast and invoicing it to a company - presumably the Asian restaurant nearby :).
I don't know the Polish market, but I'm not sure what you mean by all these fly-by-night brands. For white goods, you have Samsung, Bosch, Whirlpool, Zanussi, LG, Sharp, Siemans, Miele, etc. Did these go away or are not available in Poland? Do you guys not use Pro Test when researching white goods?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Consumer_Researc...
>My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants.
Virtual restaurants are used by actual restaurants - not just ghost kitchens. Maybe you don't see it in your area, but actual restaurants do it for a few reasons:
1. Delivery companies limit the delivery distance based on the items on the menu. e.g. sushi must be fresh so you must order it from places close by. Curry keeps so you can deliver it further. Therefore to make sure most stuff is available at a distance, a restaurant can offer a subset for long range delivery.
2. Branding isn't [only] for you. Delivery companies will offer a discount from the eye watering 30% for exclusive listings. So if you setup a virtual restaurant - a few menu changes, and, hey presto, this is an exclusive listing with a discount.
I meant white-label goods. It's when a producer churns out a product with no branding on it, to be bought by resellers, who put their own branding on it and pass it on as theirs. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product. What I mean by "fly-by-night brands" is that there's a lot of these small resellers, and some resellers may sell the same product under several brand names. These brand names are often temporary - they get used for a year or two, and then a new name may be created (particularly after previous name starts showing up with bad reviews in search results).
As for white goods, i.e. domestic appliances, we have every one of these brands you mention. I didn't know what Pro Test is, thanks for mentioning it!
If you know that Deliveroo are using slave labour then you should call the Police right now.
They also held all my band's passports as a musician, but we knew that if we were to rock up to the British embassy / consulate and requested assistance we'd have been helped to leave the country without our passports on emergency travel document, and I suspect that the Indian workers who were, in my opinion, poorly treated - they had a lot less options.
so why isn't there an indian embassy to look after their citizens overseas there? Even you admit that you cannot be poorly treated because there's a british embassy offering some level of protection.
So the root cause is that the country does not care about its citizen.
But wait, there are still buildings needing constructed in Muscat and there are not enough local people willing to be worked long hours for poor pay. So these Omani companies begin to step up recruiting in Bangladesh and now those workers start getting treated exactly as poorly as they were before.
So did we identify and solve the root cause? No, we just shuffled around the nationality who was being abused. In an ideal world everyone who needs consular assistance can get it wherever they are based, but the root cause here is abusive employment practices, do not try to pretend otherwise.
The UK for example has loads of jobs like fruit picking done by the cheapest labour allowable, in the worst conditions allowable. Those conditions are just legally mandated to be a bit better, they're still not great but the UK can afford and is willing to offer that basic level.
Significantly being repatriated without a job and no money back to the UK and India are not like for like. Even if the assistance is technically there it doesn't mean that it is equivalent.
Many people here are anti food delivery brands, it’s really exploitation here - bad food, risk to drivers, restaurants losing out
The cream on top of it all was their lack of phone or chat support. Instead, one emails an address that auto replies with a “we will get back to you within three business days” message. Not helpful when I’m trying to eat tonight!
No billing issues on my side though. I've always found the platform itself to be solid.
Tried to manipulate pricing & food choices with various algorithms (hiding restaurants, making them pay for screen estate)
Trying to run ghost kitchens and further capture market share / margin with poor quality ingredients and misleading advertising (nice photos make it look like a restaurant but it’s some sweat shop instead, likely with unhygienic conditions and slave labor)
With the pandemic receeding, I LOVE walking in fresh air and eating fresh food at a restaurant
On a general note, the world is so beautiful and needs to be enjoyed in person. All these apps are a cheap and manipulative substitution that really reduce quality of life for many. I’m looking at you Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Deliveroo etc