A dark kitchen start-up has won the backing of the co-founders of on-demand grocery delivery company Gorillas, and revealed plans to establish “hundreds of kitchens in the UK” in the next two years.
Growth Kitchen provides a network of “satellite kitchens” to restaurant brands offering delivery, as well as a technology suite that “combines lots of data sources in a proprietary way to identify areas where people want to order food, but can’t get great supply” said the company’s co-founder Tom Gatz.
It has already launched more than 20 kitchens over the last nine months, with 60 more opening soon and “another few hundred planned for next year in the UK and Europe” Gatz told The Grocer.
London restaurant brands Tortilla, Tai Kitchen and The Athenian are already using Growth Kitchen.
Late last week, Growth Kitchen announced £3m in seed funding from a range of investors including Gorillas co-founders Ronny Shibley, Jörg Kattner and Felix Chrobog. Chrobog was formerly general manager for Deliveroo in Germany.
“What Growth Kitchen brings to the table is the natural evolution of food. Where Gorillas can deliver groceries to your door in 10 minutes, the logical next step would be to go into restaurant food,” Shibley said.
“Within five minutes of visiting one of Growth Kitchen’s hubs, I knew I had finally found the team that had cracked the delivery kitchen model. They have the tech to find and operate across strategic locations and a steady flow of drivers coming in and out, while attracting top food brands who don’t churn and want to keep scaling with them,” he added.
Growth Kitchen’s tech absorbs a range of data, including spend data, average transaction size and demographic and competitive data.
“Initially we wanted to use third party software, but nobody has ever built business intelligence tools for food delivery. So we built it ourselves,” Gatz said.
This helps restaurants to “open kitchens close to our homes fast and become world-class at delivery” and overcome the “slow, complex and risky” prospect of doing it themselves, Gatz explained.
The brands using Growth Kitchen are ‘delivery app agnostic’, a point of difference with Deliveroo’s dark kitchen business Deliveroo Editions. While other dark kitchen providers offer space to rent, they rarely offer the software and data needed to scale, Gatz said.
The company would soon be “the default growth partner for high-delivery-volume restaurants across Europe”.
“We have the ambition to transform high-potential restaurants into delivery powerhouses, and to scale their concepts across the country,” Gatz added. “Ultimately, our scale will enable us to bring down their cost base and make food delivery a viable and sustainable option that can replace grocery shopping and cooking on a daily basis.”
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