Are E-Restaurants the Best Business of 2024?

In this video, Matt reacts to the idea of an e-restaurant or “ghost kitchen”. Will he think it’s a great business idea to start or does it have too many factors to overcome?

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video: 

Here’s a million-dollar business idea that you should steal from me right away. This business idea can be started with zero capital. So hear me out, I’m talking about creating an e-restaurant franchise. What this means is that this would be a restaurant that only exists online via Uber Eats, Doordash, and Grubhub. So basically the strategy is to partner with restaurants and home kitchens and then do profit shares with these business owners. You handle the menu creation,

the branding, the actual concept of the restaurant and the restaurant owner would handle cooking the food. Then you simply just list your restaurant on Uber Eats and you start making sales immediately because Uber Eats has all the customers already. So basically if you’re savvy you can leverage all these pre-existing things and create your own e-restaurant with zero capital.

Matt’s Reaction:

Okay so my question would be if I own a restaurant and you come to me say hey you can hook me up with more sales and then I find out that what you did was just put my stuff on Uber Eats. I would really wonder why I just didn’t connect with Uber Eats directly. And why I’m giving you an extra cut to do that. So that doesn’t seem like a super clear plan to me. If a restaurant isn’t already using some of those delivery services, my guess is they either don’t feel like their food or concept is a good fit for that, or they tried it and it didn’t work. Those services do take a pretty 

big cut out of what you get. This guy mentions home kitchens as one option for this but how many meals can somebody working out of a home kitchen makes? Suppose it takes off and you can’t keep up with the volume that’s a problem. Or you know the health department finds out that you’re doing Uber Eats out of your home kitchen. I’m not sure Uber Eats is allowed to or Doordash is allowed to pick up from somebody’s home and send it to someone else’s home. So this just sounds problematic to me. And probably not the way that I would spend my time trying to open a restaurant or a virtual restaurant.