The ghost kitchen concept has been gaining popularity as food delivery increased during the pandemic. As one example, in December Crave Hospitality Group closed a $7.3 million seed funding round to capitalize on the food delivery trend. It plans to use the funding to build four Crave Collective facilities in 2021 and 10 more in 2022. 

While there are some questions about this business model's durability, there are many drivers behind this trend besides consumer demand, explains Safi Aziz, senior associate of Innovation Services at PropTech VC firm MetaProp.

As COVID-19 accelerates experimentation in retail, Aziz says that shopping mall owners see ghost kitchens as an opportunity to buttress the significant losses their food courts are suffering. He tells of one shopping mall owner in Canada that is digitizing its physical food courts and serving delivery and takeout orders from different restaurants — all from one kitchen.

If the mall owner is successful, it could potentially boost existing restaurants' revenue and consolidate costs from having to keep all restaurants open. Aziz believes this strategy will carry over into a post-vaccine world.

Jonathan Needell, president and chief investment officer of KIMC, is also among those who think ghost kitchens are here to stay.

In his experience, though, ghost kitchens fare better in industrial locations because of issues like the smell of the food. "You might have a couple of different concepts co-locating for pickup and delivery online, like UberEats and things like that," Needell says. "They're in real industrial, commercial kitchens right now versus a food hall, which is more like these 800-foot kiosks that are a little bit more fly by night."