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Fast food is Patrick Mock’s bread and butter. As a Northern California franchisee of The Halal Guys, the Morgan Hill native has watched the Bay Area restaurant industry change dramatically over the last 10 years, from a focus on sit-down dining to the current high demand for delivery.
“Convenience over location — it’s a big trend,” he says. “Delivery now accounts for a substantial part of our business. We just want to give customers their food where, how and when they want it.”
Mock is hoping DoorDash has the recipe for his future success. Today, the San Francisco-based on-demand food delivery brand unveils its first shared commissary kitchen with multiple restaurants, including Mock’s newest The Halal Guys, under one roof. A fifth and final restaurant will join the kitchen soon.
The to-go-only concept, dubbed DoorDash Kitchens, is the first commissary in the nation run by a leader in the food delivery business and represents a possible future for a restaurant industry beleaguered by high rents and staffing difficulties.
Mock will share the 6,000-square-foot Redwood City space with three other popular Bay Area brands that are firsts for the Peninsula: Nation’s Giant Hamburgers, Rooster & Rice and Humphry Slocombe.
Customers in seven cities — Atherton, Belmont, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Carlos and Woodside — can use the DoorDash app to order their chicken and rice or cheeseburgers for delivery or pickup. Pickup-only options are also available in Burlingame, Foster City, Los Altos, Mountain View, San Mateo and Sunnyvale.
Coolest part? Cross-ordering between some merchants: You can get a pint of Humphry Slocombe ice cream with that Rooster & Rice order.
It’s the latest development in a trend that has seen shared smart kitchens popping up in densely-populated areas around the country to meet the demand for meal delivery, an industry that’s projected to grow from $35 billion now to $365 billion by 2030, according to UBS Evidence Lab, a research company, at a fraction of the real estate and labor costs associated with opening a new brick and mortar.
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s Ghost Kitchens operates commissary kitchens in Los Angeles and Chicago. Google Venture-backed Kitchen United runs a 12,000-square-foot shared kitchen in Pasadena with eight restaurants, including Canter’s Deli and Mama Musubi. It plans to open 400 more kitchen centers in the next four years, including one in San Francisco. Both ventures partner with mobile ordering platforms like GrubHub and UberEats for delivery.
What makes DoorDash Kitchens different is that it’s integrated: DoorDash owns the supply chain and holds 35 percent of the food delivery market, followed by UberEats at 25 percent, according to an Edison Trends report published last month. They’re also the first third-party platform to launch one of these shared “smart” kitchens, offering access to their demographic data and demand mapping — down to the specific cuisine — for their culinary partners.
In other words, they have a pretty good idea of who’s going to be craving Humphry Slocombe’s Secret Breakfast with their Rooster & Rice Khao mun gai — and when and where.
“We have a keen understanding of the market and by being vertically-integrated already, we’re able to say with pretty high conviction, given our data, what kind of sales a restaurant will do in a given geography,” says Fuad Hannon, head of new business verticals for DoorDash.
Why Redwood City? It’s where DoorDash got its start in 2013. “We’re excited about building in the place we began,” he says. “We’ve always been about the suburbs. We know they love the convenience, just like people in cities, and that’s how we chose these restaurants. They’re restaurants that already perform well on our platform, and we knew that they’d sell well on the broader Peninsula.”
DoorDash Kitchens worked closely with each merchant, co-designing their spaces to customize the environment, storage and equipment to their specific needs, whether it’s the extra freezers for Humphry Slocombe or the griddle for Nation’s grilled onion-topped burgers. That was appealing to Min Park, chief financial officer of Rooster & Rice, which has six locations in the Bay Area and three more in the works. So was the savings of entering a new market.
“We are spending about 80 to 85 percent less upfront to open,” he says.
Park says they evaluated several commissary kitchens before choosing this one.
“DoorDash is the only company devoted to delivery,” he says. “It was a great way to mitigate some of the high risks to open a restaurant, as well as the difficulty of finding staff and being in a market that’s new to us. This is a great, economical way to open a restaurant in the Bay Area. It could be a game-changer for us opening in new cities and opening faster.”
