Brown, a 43-year-old entrepreneur living in Brooklyn, had just opened The Bergen, a small takeout spot in his neighborhood, when he got a call from someone in California who said he was with a company called Future Foods. “Now in my little, 1,000-square-foot restaurant, I’m now carrying about 12, 14 brands,” says Ty Brown, with some astonishment. By the end of 2020, 51 percent had at least one.Īnd many have more than one brand. According to a report the company released this year, 15 percent of restaurants operated a virtual brand before the pandemic. Uber Eats estimates the number of virtual brands on its platform more than tripled in 2020, to over 10,000. There followed a Cambrian explosion of virtual brands. Then came COVID, and every restaurant abruptly had extra kitchen capacity and a desperate need for revenue. Virtual brands in some ways represented an opposite bet: that there are already too many restaurants, with too much kitchen capacity sitting idle, and that it can be put to use running delivery-only brands. Startups like Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens garnered large investments on the premise that multiple delivery-only restaurants sharing specialized commissary spaces would be efficient enough to thrive in the low-margin world of food delivery. But when it came to imagining the future of delivery, most attention and funding focused on the virtual brand’s better-known cousin, the ghost kitchen. In the past, restaurants might occasionally use aliases to increase their likelihood of appearing in search results, and Uber Eats has had a program helping restaurants set them up since 2017. These are called virtual brands, and as with so many pandemic trends, they preceded COVID but were accelerated by it. “Now in my little, 1,000-square-foot restaurant, I’m now carrying about 12, 14 brands” Restaurants can choose from a menu of brands with names like Hot Dog Station, Salad Box, Mr. Meanwhile, a new group of companies is aggressively courting restaurant owners and enlisting them to run delivery-only brands out of their existing businesses. In fact, during a period when restaurants closed en masse, restaurant brands proliferated.īig chains like Denny’s and Red Robin spawned brands like The Burger Den and The Wing Dept., both announced earlier this year. This March, the company told the trade publication Food on Demand that Pasqually’s is here to stay. Pasqually’s cover was blown a month later, when Kendall Neff of Philadelphia wrote on Reddit that the pizza she ordered from what she believed was a local mom and pop in fact came from Chuck E.
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With much of America suddenly interacting with restaurants through delivery apps, the food industry had been transformed into e-commerce, and the arcade better known for its ball pits than its food was free to invent a new identity: “Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings.” Cheese, of all places, that had the foresight and steely clarity to see not just what the new era required, but what it permitted. It was March 2020, and restaurants across the country were shutting down, setting up takeout windows, or doing whatever they could to absorb the shock of COVID.
Photo illustrations by Alex Castro, Amelia Holowaty Krales, Grayson Blackmon To see the future of food delivery, just look at chicken wingsīy Josh Dzieza | June 1, 2021, 10:00am EDT