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Over the past three years, Travis Kalanick, the ousted founder CEO of Uber, has been quietly purchasing real estate in major cities across the country while simultaneously investing in ghost kitchen business internationally for his ghost kitchen startup, CloudKitchens.
While CloudKitchens got an early start, in 2019 a startup called ParkJockey announced that it had raised money from the sovereign wealth fund of Dubai and Softbank to roll up the two largest parking operators in North America. This built the platform for what has been rebranded as REEF Technology, a startup that operates delivery-only kitchen trailers and other micro mobility applications on top of under-utilized parking spaces.
REEF's core bet is that as we move towards shared autonomous vehicles, the demand for parking will plummet.
With $1 billion in newly raised capital, $300 million of which is dedicated to purchasing real estate, REEF is looking to transform parking lots into what it calls a "proximity platform" that supports the on-demand economy through applications like ghost kitchens, micro-fulfillment, and COVID-19 testing sites.
According to PitchBook, CloudKitchens has raised $700 million in equity and has a debt facility of $200 million from Goldman Sachs to support its real estate acquisitions and build-outs according to a deed of trust document discovered by HNGRY.
Despite the fact that both companies have raised large sums of capital to repurpose distressed real estate, they are quick to distinguish themselves from one another. CloudKitchens is more like an Amazon fulfillment center, while REEF is more like a 7-Eleven.
CloudKitchens spends millions of dollars converting industrial warehouses into 30 to 40 individual kitchen spaces, while REEF purchases and deploys a single kitchen trailer per parking lot that it either owns or manages.
For example, CloudKitchens owns two properties in Miami: a 58,500-square foot warehouse in Wynwood and a 16,441-square foot former Brazilian restaurant in South Beach. By contrast, REEF has blanketed the city with a dozen trailers across six zip codes, each of which can prepare as many as seven different delivery concepts. While these trailers aren't as mobile as food trucks, they can be quickly removed or deployed from any permitted site.
CloudKitchens leases its kitchens to large QSRs like WingStop, Chick-fil-A, and Panda Express while REEF operates delivery-only franchises on behalf of mostly smaller brands like Fuku, Umami Burger, and Wow Bao.
By and large, both teams are focused on the same markets, with a high concentration of overlap in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin, Houston, and Philadelphia.
While REEF's modular form factor lends itself to more locations per city, both companies share a similar number of locations in cities like Chicago and LA. Unlike its stealth rival CloudKitchens, REEF has made noticeable attempts brand its trailers and give them the appearance of a neighborhood-friendly destination — despite the fact that its trailers' sole purpose is to fulfill delivery orders.
In some cases, REEF lays out astro turf and picnic benches outside of its trailers as a welcome mat despite the fact that all orders must be placed via a delivery app.
At the other end of the spectrum, CloudKitchens' facilities go out of their way to disassociate themselves from their parent company, opting to brand each property as a "Food Center,""Food Nest,""Food Hall,""Food Hub," or "Food Junction" instead.
The front-of-house areas are primarily designed as waiting rooms for delivery drivers with waiting benches, order screens, and bathrooms. Interior renderings of newer locations depict food lockers for customers to order ahead and pick up as well as ordering tablets for walk-up orders.
REEF has the ability to deploy a greater number of locations by volume in a shorter time span than CloudKitchens, while CloudKitchen has a distinct advantage in scale.
With their current footprints, CloudKitchens can support nearly 10 times the number of brands in a single location than REEF, because the average Cloud Kitchen facility houses 30 individual kitchens that can list themselves as four different concepts, for a total of 120 brands from one CloudKitchen location. REEF, meanwhile, can host just 7.
On top of this, CloudKitchens is expanding into CloudRetail to add consumer items like ice cream, alcohol, and everyday household essentials to consumers' food delivery baskets.
There are glimpses of the grander ambitions CloudKitchens has, beyond just delivering takeout and groceries: Last April, the company briefly tipped its hand by launching the "Internet Food Court," a virtual food hall that allowed consumers to order across all of its concepts in a single batched order from its second facility in Koreatown, Los Angeles before being mysteriously deleted from the internet a day later.
Matt Newberg is the founder of HNGRY, a subscription media platform exploring the cutting edge of food and technology through trends like ghost kitchens, dark stores, fungi-based meat, and personalized nutrition. Subscribe to the free weekly newsletter here or try a premium subscription for $5 with promo code INSIDER5.
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