A cloud kitchen (also called a dark kitchen, ghost kitchen or delivery-only kitchen) is a food business that cooks only for delivery and takeaway, with no dining area and no walk-in customers. Orders arrive through delivery apps, WhatsApp, phone calls or a store page, and the kitchen can sit in a cheap back lane or industrial area because footfall does not matter. One kitchen can run several brands from the same stove.
Why it matters
The model cuts rent and setup cost sharply compared with a dine-in restaurant, which is why it is the most common way to start a food business in Indian cities today. The flip side is that with no walk-in discovery, every order comes through an online channel. If all of that is delivery apps, commission of commonly 18 to 30 percent sits on every order, and the app owns the customer. Cloud kitchens that last build a direct channel early. How to start a cloud kitchen in India covers licences, costs and the first 90 days.
Example
A 300 sq ft kitchen in Lucknow rents for ₹18,000 a month, against ₹60,000 or more for a 40-seat restaurant in a market area, and the fit-out is commonly a few lakh rather than tens of lakhs. At 40 orders a day with an average of ₹350, monthly revenue is about ₹4.2 lakh. At 25 percent commission, ₹1.05 lakh of that goes to the apps every month. Moving even 30 percent of those orders to a direct channel at ₹10 per order saves roughly ₹28,000 a month, which for most small kitchens is the difference between profit and break-even. Cloud kitchen without delivery apps looks at how far that can go.
Cloud kitchens on Tezzu take direct orders on their own WhatsApp number and a free store page at a flat ₹10 per order; see Tezzu for cloud kitchens.