The Burst And Business Of CLOUD KITCHENS

When the pandemic locked us all down to test our cooking skills and burn banana breads, the sprouting of cloud kitchens rescued us from our own cooking dilemma. Even after restaurants being back in action, albeit shortly, the cloud kitchen industry is in no mood to stop

- Samreen Tungekar

2020 may not have been your first brush with the concept of cloud kitchens, but it surely was the year where most of us, sick and tired of our own cooking, missing our house helps, sat up and took notice of how conveniently the cloud kitchen delivery model has allowed us to gorge on food at home because eating out became a thing of the past. From the occasional Faasos rolls or a Behrouz biryani to having gourmet burgers and full-blown Asian fare, everything now comes home.

Simply put, a cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen is a cooking space with no dine-in option. The model relies on orders placed through food tech platforms, online aggregators, or their own websites. For a while, everyone in the F&B industry, including five-star hotels, went the cloud kitchen way. In 2020, not only did numerous individual, localised cloud kitchens open up, but also the established hospitality chains saw the opportunity to tap into the market, and are continuing to do so. As the uncertainty prevails, more cloud kitchens continue to open.