Start a Ghost Kitchen

You may be someone like me that loves to cook or has always wanted to start your own restaurant. The one thing that can be tough about starting a restaurant though is the startup costs and the overhead. The good news is that with the invention of food delivery apps like Door Dash, Grub Hub and Uber Eats you don’t have to pay a fortune in start up costs and overhead in order to start selling food. You can actually start selling food for delivery right from your home and start scaling your restaurant business with very low up-front costs. In this section we will go over how to start a business like this and how to set it up so that you can become highly profitable very quickly.

The first thing you should do if you are looking to start a ghost kitchen is to come up with a brand and a menu for your restaurant. It is important to keep in mind that you do not necessarily want people to know that you are cooking their food out of your house. The brand should make them think that you are a high quality dining establishment just like any other place they would go in and eat at. I would also actually recommend coming up with multiple brands of restaurants and menus from the start so you can multiply your chances of receiving an order. Remember that the food delivery services do not charge you anything unless you take an order so to me it is very important to put your business out there with as many different restaurants as possible. A good number of brands to start with in my opinion is 3 and then you can start to experiment more from there. Your brands and menus should be unique in some ways but also allow you to use many of the same ingredients for each brand as you can. For example, there are many different food cultures that use chicken with different seasonings and sauces. If you were to make a wing/ tender brand, a chicken sandwich brand and a Chinese chicken brand you can avoid ending up with food waste if one does not perform as well. You should keep your menus simple to start, with just a few different options to choose from. Again this will keep you from holding onto inventory for too long and losing money on waste. For example if it is a wing brand you are starting you may want to stick to just wings, tenders, salads, drinks and your basic sides like fries and onion rings. The fries and onion rings as well as tenders can be used in  your other brands’ menus and they will be easy to get rid of without overwhelming customers with options. Once you have your menus set up make sure to take some nice well-lit pictures of each of your menu items and create a good name and logo for your brands. I like to use Fiverr to get my logos made because the people with good reviews tend to do good work and let you work with them to get a design you like. Also you can message them to ask for a discount on doing multiple logos at once for your different brands. After you get all this set up you will almost be ready to get yourself listed on the different delivery services.

The next step to setting up your ghost kitchen is setting up an LLC that you can attach to the delivery apps for tax purposes. You will need an LLC in order to get a seller account set up with Door Dash, Grub Hub and Uber Eats. You can go online to your states business formation site and get an LLC set up  yourself for around $50 in most places, or you can pay an accountant to do it for you for a small fee. Once you get your LLC set up and your EIN number which acts as the social security number for your business, you will attach this information to the delivery apps and set up your accounts to start selling your food.

Now that your accounts and menus are set up you will want to find a good supplier to use for buying your food long term. Starting out I highly recommend simply using a wholesale store like Costco or Sam’s Club to buy your food. This is a fairly cost-effective way to purchase your food and the good part is that you don’t have to buy in too much bulk starting out so you should have no problem selling it all before it goes bad. Once you get some traction going with your brands and you know how much food you are selling consistently you can start getting quotes from food distributors like Sysco and U.S. Foods to get better pricing in bulk. During this stage you should also be purchasing the packaging you will be using to hold the food you sell. I would recommend ordering a similar type of food to yours from a popular restaurant on Door Dash and seeing how they pack the same food. This will give you a good idea of what you should be buying yourself.

Now that you are all ready to start serving your food on the delivery apps it is time to start marketing your brands and getting your name out there! The first step you should take is to get all of your family and friends to order from you and leave you 5-star reviews so that you have social proof on all the apps. You can even pay them back some of the money they give you if your friends are cheap like that. Once you have some good reviews built up like this you can start joining as many Facebook groups of people in your delivery area as you can and start mentioning your brands. I would suggest adding some value to the groups first for about a week by answering some people’s questions in the groups and making sure people are familiar with you before making a post that introduces yourself and mentions the restaurants you built up for delivery. You can even offer them a discount code to make them feel like a friend!

Another thing you can do to advertise your brands is to promote an event for your opening day. You can post to the groups on Facebook that you joined and message all your friends on social media to come out to a park or central location in your area for free food and a good time just so people in the area can get acquainted with the food you make. I would even go as far to do a giveaway of one free meal a week for someone who brings the most people to your event or a random person that shows up. Whatever you do to promote it, be creative and get the word out to as many people as you can. It may cost you $1,000 in food to hold an event like this but if it is done well and you do get a bunch of people to show up, you will have a large customer base that will be loyal to your brands forever! I would set up a table at the event with a sign that mentions the delivery services you have your food on with a QR code that takes them to a site with links to all your delivery services. It wouldn’t hurt to leave a big tip jar out as well to recoup as much of the cost of the food as possible. If there is a college around you, or simply a place with good foot traffic, it may be a good idea to hand out small samples of your best food items in those areas without even needing to set up an event.

The last type of marketing you should use is social media marketing by creating accounts for all your brands on Instagram and Facebook. I would go as far as sending direct messages to as many people from your area as possible and simply introducing yourself and your new business by sending a coupon code to them. Remember that whatever type of marketing you use it is always a numbers game. If you send a hundred messages a day, post in 3 groups a day, hold 2 sample giveaways a week and post every other day on your socials then it will be impossible to fail if you are selling a good product.