告白摩天轮的个人资料

Food delivery apps have made it possible to order restaurant food with the tap of a finger, but increasingly the most popular dishes aren’t coming from restaurants at all.

Starting a successful restaurant can be a daunting challenge for even the most ambitious entrepreneur. A survey by accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young has found that 35 of the UK’s top 100 restaurants are now making a loss. Slim margins face increasing pressure as real estate and wage costs continue to rise.

Not even the country’s most celebrated chefs are safe. Last year, the Naked Chef chain was forced to close 12 out of 37 Jamie Oliver’s Italian Restaurants when the company’s debts exceeded ￡70 million.  High profile failures like this demonstrate that even industry leaders are having a hard time navigating a challenging market. Fortunately, however, digital platforms are providing innovative chefs with an opportunity to launch an entirely new type of restaurant.

Your rider is on their way

Dark kitchens employ no wait staff, have no dining tables and receive 100 per cent of their orders through Deliveroo or Uber Eats. With just a small kitchen and a skilled chef, they outcompete restaurant chains with global marketing budgets and decades of hard-earned brand loyalty — all while paying a fraction of the rental costs typically associated with a successful restaurant.

This comes at a time when the UK public is spending more than ever on food. According to consumer finance research firm NimbleFins, UK households spent 16 per cent of their total budgets on food and non-alcoholic drinks in 2018 — and it’s likely this figure will continue to rise as the food delivery market matures and digital platforms become more and more seamless and convenient for consumers.

Meals from nowhere

Many restaurants started to rethink their value proposition as soon as platforms like Deliveroo and Uber Eats launched in their area. Soon, these platforms began to receive applications from new restaurants in unusual places. Instead of city centre locations on busy high streets, new restaurants were opening in industrial sites with easy access to the main arterial roads of cities, maximising their delivery radius. It didn’t take the delivery apps long to identify the trend and move to capitalise on it.

In 2017, Deliveroo bought a car park in Blackwell and filled it with 10 shipping containers. The goal was to create a space where dark kitchens could launch with zero start-up costs. Food companies told the platform what they needed in their kitchens and Deliveroo kitted out the spaces so they could be ready to take orders immediately.  And it turns out that Deliveroo isn’t the only company that has spotted the opportunity.

A new property race is born

Since being ousted as CEO at Uber, Travis Kalanick has been reassessing the successes of his former company. Food deliveries have become an increasingly important part of Uber’s operations, last year accounting for 17 per cent of the platform’s total bookings. Kalanick took the first steps to expand his vision for dark kitchens internationally when his company acquired London-based startup FoodStars last year. This places him in direct competition with his former company, which took its first steps into the market last year.

The more these platforms can streamline the ordering, marketing and delivery of meals, the more chefs can specialise on their product — and this extends beyond simply connecting hungry customers with restaurants through an app. It’s about finding the right locations to reach untapped markets, but that can be challenging in the current property market.

At Pi Labs, we’re excited to have some of London’s brightest entrepreneurs tackling this problem. ShareDining enables property owners to rent out unused cooking spaces to restaurant operators - effectively creating an Airbnb-like platform for dark kitchens. This allows chefs greater flexibility to experiment with different locations while they find their niche.

Transforming the high street

Dark kitchens are already changing the way we eat. Market analyst firm NPD Group forecasts that the booming online food delivery market will grow by 22% to reach ￡5.8 billion by 2021. If these projections are accurate, we can expect to see the trend to not only impact our diets but the layouts of our cities too.

High streets were once the focal points of commerce, but escalating property prices are making it more difficult for businesses to afford prime locations. That doesn’t mean the game is over though. The next frontier in real estate selection for new ventures is likely to be less about storefronts and footfall and much more about how well-connected an area is for rapid deliveries.

Today’s consumers already prefer to shop online rather than offline, and it’s likely that digital platforms will continue to connect businesses with customers in new and unexpected ways. It may only be a matter of time before we start to see dark clothing stores or dark supermarkets join dark kitchens in reimagined business venues. As the trend continues, distressed real estate will be repurposed for online-focused ventures while high streets will be freed up for experience-focused ventures.Food delivery apps have made it possible to order restaurant food with the tap of a finger, but increasingly the most popular dishes aren’t coming from restaurants at all.

Dark kitchens represent an interesting turning point in the way we think about the cities we live in. If the high street is dead, then dark kitchens suggest that life may yet be found in under-utilised retail centres and industrial parks outside of heavily-populated city centres. Restaurants may have been the first to adopt on-demand deliveries and virtualise their operations — but they won’t be the last.

About the Author

Dominic Wilson is Co-Founder and Managing General Partner at Pi Labs. He leads the firm in a general capacity with a specific focus on investments and investors. He also sits on the boards of Brolly, FalconDHQ and Office App. Dominic has a wide background in Private Equity Real Estate worked with both AEW Europe and Savills Investment Management and transacted over €3bn of deals across Europe. He has a degree in Law with French from the University of Birmingham and an MBA from the London Business School.

About Pi Labs

Pi Labs is Europe’s first VC firm to focus exclusively on proptech investments. It has established itself as a pre-eminent global leader in the early stage domain in this vertical. To date, it has made 44 investments including Airsorted, Land Insight and Plentific. Pi Labs is global in its focus — it has backed founders from 21 different nationalities. To date, its portfolio companies have raised over $140m.