The Virginian-Pilot: The strange, underground world of ghost kitchens in Hampton Roads
I have arrived at a neutral location — the parking lot of a Virginia Beach Barnes & Noble — to procure a bag of hamburgers that can’t be found at any restaurant.
The burgers in question are not good, as it turns out. They are, in fact, barely edible. But they arrive with a pedigree of sorts. They come from MrBeast Burger, a fast-food chain that launched overnight in December with a boggling 300 locations, stamped with the name of a 22-year-old North Carolina YouTube star famous for filming himself giving away stacks of money to randomly selected people.
MrBeast is not a traditional restaurant, in the sense that you can’t actually go there. They also lack so much as a phone number. The burger spot instead has a shadowy and somewhat tenuous existence: findable only on delivery apps, and only if your address happens to fall within the delivery radius.
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Large companies are far more likely to have the infrastructure in place to set up ghost brands that can crowd out struggling local businesses on delivery apps, says Pat Garofalo, a director at anti-monopoly advocacy group the American Economic Liberties Project.
“It’s generally a bad situation for small, local business,” Garofalo says. “The pandemic has become an opportunity for these companies that have financial backing to surge into all these areas, and take advantage of the struggles of small businesses. “
Ghost kitchens are sometimes set up in partnership with app companies such as DoorDash, he says, who use data they’ve gathered from their own clients to conduct pinpoint marketing of dishes sold in direct competition with local restaurants.
The ghost kitchen concepts can, of course, also help local restaurants, says Virtual Dining Concepts spokesperson Tamar Aprahamian. She notes that while many MrBeast locations are chain spots, others are small restaurants who’ve been kept afloat during the pandemic by the added delivery business provided by fans of Mariah Carey or Jimmy Donaldson.
But in the long run, Garofolo considers the ghost kitchen an existential threat to traditional small restaurants, especially as the delivery market expands.
“The question is, do we want small businesses to survive?” he says. “Or do we want a world where the only option is SEO-optimized stuff that comes from a warehouse down the street?”