Just Eat Takeaway is selling Grubhub to Wonder, a delivery-focused restaurant chain, for $650 million just four years after acquiring the U.S. food delivery app in a multibillion-dollar deal. The Netherlands-based food delivery group, Europe’s largest, has been evaluating a departure from the U.S. since 2022 after a long and difficult road. Grubhub struggles with slow growth, eyes reinvention …
Tag Archives: Virtual Restaurants
Sam Nazarian buys Kitchen United IP, forms new virtual brand platform
Dive Brief: Dive Insight: Everybody Eats is staking out ambitions comparable with the failed business forecasts of ghost kitchen pioneers. The press release states the platform will leverage “rapidly evolving customer preferences through use of technology, AI, use of retail space and the expansion into CPG, supermarkets, convenience, casual dining, education, hospitality, limited service hotels all within …
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Empower Delivery Getting OOMI’s Ducks in a Row
OOMI, a single-location delivery kitchen in downtown Dallas, has begun using Empower Delivery to optimize its kitchen management in-house delivery program. The software startup was recently spun off of ClusterTruck, and is designed to help delivery-centric operations improve their off-premises economics and reduce delivery times with precisely coordinated in-house drivers. OOMI’s first location outside downtown …
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MrBeast sues Virtual Dining Concepts to shut down MrBeast Burger
MrBeast wants MrBeast Burger gone. The YouTube megastar on Monday filed a lawsuit in New York District Court that accuses Virtual Dining Concepts, the parent company of the virtual burger brand, of damaging his reputation by selling undercooked burgers and cold fries with his name on them. The complaint asks the court to allow MrBeast …
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‘Ghost’ menu massacre: Virtual brands face a reckoning as Uber Eats slashes 8,000 from its app
In March, Uber Eats began weeding out delivery-only brands clogging its app. About 8,000 brands were wiped — 3,000 more than Uber Eats anticipated when it rolled out the new rules, which were designed to ensure consumers saw authentic restaurant varieties on the app, the company said. Uber Eats’ virtual-brand policies come a year after Insider reported that DoorDash and …
SBE Hospitality, C3 Founder Sam Nazarian Acquires Nextbite
Sam Nazarian, founder and CEO of the sbe hospitality group and virtual restaurant platform C3, announced the sole acquisition of Nextbite, one of the leading virtual brand providers created by Ordermark founder Alex Canter. Nextbite’s brand name will live on as Nextbite by sbe, further cementing the ongoing evolution that’s merging entertainment, hospitality, food halls, …
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AT A CLEVELAND CLOUDKITCHENS, OPERATORS SAY THEY WERE SET UP TO FAIL
Tiffany Rogers wanted a permanent home for her catering business. Jay Freeman planned to expand an existing restaurant. Latisha Clark hoped to pursue her passion for feeding people. One by one, the chefs found their way to Carnegie Food Hub, a CloudKitchens facility in Cleveland’s MidTown neighborhood. They were drawn in by a proposition of …
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CLOUDKITCHENS SOLD THESE RESTAURANTS A DREAM. WHAT THEY GOT WAS A NIGHTMARE
Eric Roldan had always wanted to open a restaurant. Drawing on his Puerto Rican heritage, the menu would feature plantain-based dishes like jibaritos and mofongo. It would also have a mojito bar. He’d always envisioned it as a sit-down place. But then Roldan’s business partner told him about CloudKitchens, a company that rents kitchen space …
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Franklin Junction Expands with Hooters, Nathan’s Famous
Franklin Junction is expanding its partnership with Hooters and Nathan’s Famous, two of the company’s incoming brands cooked and packaged for delivery inside existing restaurant kitchens. In revising its partnership, Hooters will serve as one of Franklin Junction’s first “dual partners,” entering new markets as what it calls a “cloud concept” with a goal of …
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Decrying Influence of ‘Tech Bros,’ OOMI Digital Kitchen Launches in Dallas
With a spicy announcement decrying the influence of “food tech bros” in the delivery space, OOMI Digital Kitchen is a new ghost kitchen opening this month in Dallas, led by the founder of Urban Taco. The new ghost kitchen aims to define what it calls the second wave of the category with a focus on food …
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