The Pandemic-Led Rise of The Ghost Kitchen

The Pandemic-Led Rise of The Ghost Kitchen

A relatively new concept, the ghost kitchen has only been around for the last couple of years. They first emerged when the restaurant meal delivery industry began to soar. The popularity of third-party delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, and UberEats made it easy for people to order and get any meal delivered to their door. With this new convenience of at-home delivery options, consumers continued to place orders while restaurants started developing and utilizing ghost kitchens to answer the demand.  

While these production-focused kitchens were slowly being adapted by restauranteurs trying to efficiently meet delivery demands – it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic that ghost kitchens began to boom. With strict Covid-19 safety restrictions, restaurant owners had to find ways to keep their restaurants open without physically entering the dining space and with a minimal number of employees. To fill this need, they turned to ghost kitchens.

What is a Ghost Kitchen?

A ghost kitchen is essentially a restaurant without a dining space. Most ghost kitchens exist as delivery-only spaces. They focus on selling and fulfilling online orders and use their own or a third-party app for delivery. With no dining space and much work done virtually, these kitchens are “restaurants” with no visible storefront. A ghost kitchen can exist in a variety of spaces and can be shared by a number of brands. From a preexisting restaurant where the dining space is unused to a kitchen-only space used only for carryout, no matter how the ghost kitchen is set up, they all need the same thing: great cooking equipment. 

Highly Efficient Ghost Kitchen Equipment

One of the benefits of a ghost kitchen is flexibility with staffing, menu items, and budget. This kitchen-only setup allows business owners to spend less time and money on outfitting a dining space or employees and more time picking out the right kitchen equipment and process. To create a fully functional ghost kitchen that is efficient and can meet the market’s carryout culture of fast, high-quality, and delicious food, restaurateurs have focused on outfitting their kitchen with the latest sous vide cooking equipment. 

Aside from providing delicious, tender, and healthy foods, there are many benefits of using the sous vide cooking method for your ghost kitchen. Incorporating this machine in a ghost kitchen will provide a multitude of benefits, including:

• It eliminates human error and improves the quality of the finished product.
• Dramatically reduces the need for preservatives and additives.
• Produces naturally tender meat – no matter what the cut or quality.
• The largely unmonitored cooking process minimizes the need for a large staff.
• The vacuum-sealed package allows products to be cooked and chilled to inventory rather than order and then stored and reheated when needed.
• The technique naturally intensifies flavors without additives or extra spices, allowing for lower recipe ingredient costs.

For businesses that want to keep ingredient and labor expenses low but quality high, a commercial sous vide system is the perfect addition to their commercial kitchen. 

DC Norris Commercial Sous Vide Cook Tank

In 2020, DC Norris North America launched the CT-1 to the North American market. The CT-1 is a commercial scale, electric-powered, automated sous vide cook tank with a 7” full-color touch panel and dual temperature probe technology. Those dual temperature probes (one monitoring water temperature and one monitoring internal core product temperature) allow foods to be cooked to exacting internal temperatures and then cooled safely. The CT-1 is compatible with DC Norris cooling equipment and seamlessly sends batch data to DC Norris’s patented Virtual Chart Recorder software (optional).

With a smaller footprint than other types of traditional commercial cooking machinery, the CT-1 sous vide cook tank allows smaller-scale food manufacturers and ghost kitchens to take advantage of the sous vide cooking method. To learn more about the sous vide cooking process or the machinery, contact DC Norris today.