Ghost Kitchens Push Into Grocery Stores With Kroger-Kitchen United Deal

Ghost kitchens are officially moving into grocery stores.

Kroger, the country’s largest grocer, announced earlier this week it will partner with ghost kitchen company Kitchen United to offer customers freshly prepared restaurant food served on demand in the chain’s participating locations. The off-premise kitchen will feature up to six local, regional, or national restaurant brands, the companies said in a joint statement, and consumers can order via the Kitchen United website or app or on-site using kiosks.

The first location is slated to open this fall at a Ralphs store in the Los Angeles area.

“Our customers’ appetite for fresh, on-demand meals continues to accelerate, and we remain focused on offering new and innovative products that provide anything, anytime, anywhere,” said Dan De La Rosa, Kroger’s group vice president, of fresh merchandising “Our partnership with Kitchen United taps into restaurants’ growing use of off-premise kitchen space to increase customers’ access to their favorite foods.”

Ghost kitchens skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic, and restaurant digital orders increased 19% year-over-year in January 2019 to 145% YOY in December 2020, according to NPD’s daily tracking of consumers’ use of restaurants and other foodservice outlets. Pre-COVID, the concept was limited to more industrial areas, but hybrid ghost kitchen/food hall combos began emerging in the last few years. They are typically either managed by a single operator or by a ghost kitchen manager that licenses the space out to other users. 

Restaurateurs and outside operators also began to lease vacant hotel kitchen space at the height of the pandemic. Matt Vannini, a fourth-generation restaurateur and president of Restaurant Solutions Inc, told GlobeSt in an earlier interview that the concept makes a lot of sense. 

“Hotels have space,” Vannini says. “They have separate storage, which creates separate inventory. They have fully serviced areas that they can allow somebody to utilize.”

And vacant restaurant space has also been activated for ghost kitchens, said Peter Klamka, CEO of Cordia.

“There’s more vacant restaurant space than can be absorbed in a couple of lifetimes,” Klamka said in an earlier GlobeSt.com interview. He says a 2,000-square-foot commercial kitchen with a converted dining area for prep and pickup is ideal, and his Los Angeles-based company is looking at former restaurant spaces—whether they’re old Subways, strip center Chinese restaurants or spaces inside office buildings, which can be catering hubs—for potential ghost kitchen locations.

Ghost kitchens are even finding their way into multifamily buildings. Earlier this spring, food and beverage platform C3 announced a partnership with Akara Living to integrate ghost kitchens in Kenect, one of Akara’s serviced apartment communities in Nashville and Phoenix.