How to Start a Virtual Restaurant | Superorder

How To Start A Virtual Restaurant. What Restauranteurs Must Know About Opening a Ghost Kitchen

If you're a restauranteur, you know that running a restaurant is hard work. There are a million moving pieces between hiring the right team, managing inventory, and organizing your finances. With Covid-19 coming into play last year, many restauranteurs shook their heads in dismay at another thing they had to deal with. Covid-19 hasn't been kind to restaurants and has forced many to rethink their entire business model. Enter: Virtual restaurants! The virtual restaurant model allows restauranteurs to create a virtual brand out of its existing location and increase potential revenue!

What are virtual restaurants?

Virtual restaurants, or delivery only restaurants, have no brick-and-mortar location and only serve food through delivery or takeout orders. Virtual restaurants increase restaurant revenue - while leveraging underutilized kitchen space - by tapping into the massive customer base that food-delivery platforms have built up. Opposed to ghost kitchens, you can run a virtual restaurant out of your existing brick and mortar store!

How do they work?

Virtual kitchens work in a similar way to a restaurant. You need to create a menu, cook delicious food, and serve guests. However, there are several steps you need to take to ensure that your virtual kitchen is a success! In a delivery-only model, you won't be welcoming guests to a physical location. Most of the guest interaction will be done through online platforms where you will feature your dishes. Starting a virtual restaurant can be tricky. Here are some steps that you need to take to make sure your virtual restaurant is successful!

1. Research what cuisine is in demand in your area.
2. Research other delivery only restaurants, their prices, and price your food accordingly.
3. Create a brand name for your and logo that will catch customer's attention.
4. Create a yelp page, website, and arrange for a photographer to take pictures of your virtual concept's foods.
5. Upload your virtual restaurant brand onto food-delivery platforms and order a POS tablet or an aggregation tablet.
6. Wait for the tablets to arrive, activate them, and launch your virtual restaurant!

All of this takes a lot of work that operators mostly don't have time for. Luckily, here at Superorder, our launch experts will help you every step of the way to make sure that your launch is successful! We have helped many restauranteurs in the past launch successful virtual restaurants. Here's how our team will help you build a virtual restaurant:

1. To ensure that a virtual restaurant will have demand, a launch specialist will analyze market trends from your city including:
2. The most frequently ordered cuisines.
3. Brand names earning positive reviews.
4. Prices on popular menus around you to make sure that your menu will stay competitive.
5. We will then help you come up with the right menu based on our data-driven findings.
6. Our branding team will work on a crisp logo and catchy name for your virtual restaurant.
7. We'll send you a menu and a brand concept for approval and after getting your go ahead and arrange the following:
8. A photographer to stop by your restaurant to capture high-quality photos of the foods you will make.
9. Create a Yelp page, Google Places tag, and an eye-catching website to solidify your virtual brand's local presence.
10. A tablet to be shipped to you (for no cost) to track all virtual restaurant orders from one place.
11. Once the tablet arrives, a launch specialist will call you and guide you and your team through the launch process and get you on your way!
12. Begin taking orders and growing your revenue!

What are the benefits?

There are three main benefits of launching your own virtual restaurant.

The first is the fact that your restaurant will be leveraging underutilized kitchen space and creating more revenue for your business. There's a good chance that your kitchen and staff are not being pushed to the max! There is some room for more orders and that is exactly what virtual restaurants are for! By creating a virtual brand in your existing restaurant, you can increase the volume of orders you get on a weekly basis while using the same kitchen and staff!

The second benefit of a virtual restaurant is the ability to test new concepts with a lower risk. Let's say you wanted to test new menu items but didn't want to risk offering them to your regular guests in case you weren't sure how they were going to fly yet. A virtual brand allows you to test new menu items and get feedback on their performance. If your new dish does really well online then chances are that it will do really well in your restaurant as well!

The third benefit of launching a virtual restaurant brand is that you can test many different brands at once! Why stop at one or two virtual brands? If your kitchen has the right capacity, you can launch several out of your existing store! Here at Superorder, we have helped many restauranteurs launch several delivery-only restaurants!

Launch your own delivery-only restaurant with Superorder today

If the information above got you excited about virtual restaurants and think that your operations can handle an increase in volume, we are here to help you!

At Superorder, we're here to help you with any questions you may have on virtual restaurants. Book a time to speak to one of our launch specialists to learn how to launch your own delivery-only restaurant.

Book a demo here!