Travis Kalanick said that when he left Uber in 2017, someone told him that 13 percent of all the miles he drove in San Francisco were “Uber miles.” The ride-hailing giant's co-founder recalled thinking, “Can we do that with food?”
Kalanick, who acquired CloudKitchens' parent company City Storage Systems in 2018, took to the stage today at the Food on Demand Conference in Las Vegas to share his vision for an online food ecosystem and the company's platform to enable it. talked about what he is working on. “Since Uber, I've become really private,” said the often secretive entrepreneur, who says his whole purpose in working life is “to digitize the physical world.” For restaurants and other food companies, he explained, there is a need to lower costs. Reduce meal delivery costs while maintaining convenience.
“Can we do for our kitchen what Uber did for our cars?” he wonders, as food delivery becomes more efficient and cheaper, and the cost of a delivered meal is starting to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. . To achieve that lofty goal, Kalanick believes that customers will be able to order anything online, the dining experience will be “hyper-individualized,” and the desire for instant gratification will be less than his 90 minutes and his 15 minutes. We are envisioning an “Internet food court” that can be filled with delivery times of just minutes.
“To lower the cost of meals, we need to fully automate production, and we need to fully automate logistics,” Kalanick said.
“We envision where this is going, but there is a path to get there, and we call it infrastructure for better food,” he continued. “That is the mission of my company.”
CloudKitchens has over 400 ghost kitchens on its network and is part of its infrastructure. But the ghost kitchen model continues to face challenges as restaurants and kitchen providers face cost pressures and slowing customer demand growth at the height of the pandemic boom. CloudKitchens itself, like other restaurant, tech and real estate companies, has dealt with layoffs and store closures to control expenses amid changing business conditions.
However, Kalanick noted that the average selling price for enterprise brands offering menus through CloudKitchens is $1.2 million. Data from Otter, another of his subsidiaries at City Storage Systems, also helps restaurant brands understand where their locations are performing best when analyzing order volume. I can.
The Otter software and platform, which Kalanick described as “mission control” rather than a point-of-sale system, helps restaurants manage food delivery company orders in one place. It touts itself as a restaurant operating system with features such as “Always On,” which monitors online orders and activates when needed across all of a restaurant chain's locations. According to Kalanick, if an online store is marked “closed” when it shouldn't be, that means lost sales, and Otter automates the process to ensure those sales are captured. do. Other features include redirecting ad spend to third-party distribution platforms when in-store traffic is slow and providing tools to recoup revenue.
On the automation front, City Storage Systems last year began testing robotics in the kitchen under its Lab37 subsidiary. “We call it Bowl Builder, and it's a first on the robotics side,” Kalanick says. “I call it, look, mom, no hands.”
Operating out of Lab37's facility near Pittsburgh, the bowl builder can produce 100 bowls per hour. This follows the introduction of similar Makeline technology debuted by Sweetgreen. Chipotle is testing a system by Hyphen. Robots are coming to the restaurant industry in many ways, but automation is far from easy.
Kalanick acknowledged that there is much to accomplish between now and the realization of Internet food courts, and that restaurant companies themselves are an essential component. Partnering with restaurants is “a way to get to the future faster,” he said.
The 7th Annual Food on Demand Conference, offering insights from leading restaurant and foodservice stakeholders in mobile ordering, delivery, virtual restaurants, catering and technology, runs through May 10 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas will be done.