Throughout 2020, the restaurant industry faced unprecedented disruption, challenges, and uncertainty. Despite this, restaurateurs demonstrated their incredible resilience through creative and innovative solutions that enabled them to continue to serve their communities and feed hungry diners. One of the most compelling examples of this was the rise of virtual restaurant concepts.
Virtual restaurants are delivery-only restaurant concepts that use existing kitchen and staff to test new restaurant concepts and build diverse revenue streams into a restaurant's business model. And with 60% of U.S. consumers ordering delivery or takeout once a week, it has become more critical than ever before for restaurants to find innovative ways to connect to U.S. consumers who rely on delivery and takeout.
How do virtual restaurants work?
Virtual restaurants typically share a kitchen with an existing brick-and-mortar restaurant to prepare and package orders. Customers order from a secondary menu that's available exclusively online, and often exclusively for delivery. The current restaurant's staff prepares those orders alongside orders from the primary business.
Virtual restaurants offer a way to bring new orders and revenue to your business–and without increasing overhead. So, how can you get started?
How to tap into this emerging trend and diversify your business model
Many independent restaurateurs will create their own virtual restaurant from scratch to drive more business and reach more customers with new cuisines and concepts. Although many restaurateurs have done very well with their own virtual restaurant concepts, they also require more effort and investment to get off the ground.
Because of these challenges, more and more independent restaurateurs have chosen to launch branded virtual restaurants to get into the virtual restaurant game much quicker. These are pre-built virtual restaurant concepts created by expert chefs and typically backed by celebrities or well-known partners in the industry.
Similar to launching your own virtual restaurant, branded virtual restaurants can operate from your existing brick-and-mortar restaurant, using your existing kitchen, ingredients, and staff. Instead of having to spend the time and money to develop your own virtual restaurant concept from scratch, you can use an established nationally marketed, ready-to-launch pre-built virtual restaurant.
Branded virtual restaurants have quickly become the top choice for independent restaurateurs looking to launch a virtual restaurant for several reasons:
They're turnkey: For restaurateurs who want to jump into virtual restaurants and quickly inject a new revenue stream into their business, branded virtual restaurants provide an instant, turnkey solution. The concept, packaging, marketing, and more are already fully developed. You just order the resources, prepare the food, and start taking orders.
They're fully established: When you partner with an established branded virtual restaurant, you're launching a mature, fully developed concept and menu, with branding and packaging expertly crafted by leading industry professionals.
They're popular: Branded virtual restaurants come with national marketing campaigns, often backed by well-known celebrities and respected restaurant groups like Lettuce Entertain You. Customers in your market are likely already aware of these celebrities and brands, removing the biggest hurdle to making a new virtual restaurant stick.
They work: Independent restaurateurs on Grubhub working with branded virtual restaurants have seen an average incremental order increase of more than 20%, with some brands seeing increases of over 50%. Among customers placing orders with branded virtual restaurants, 40-95% are net-new customers for the restaurant.
For all these reasons, branded virtual restaurants have quickly emerged as the wave of the future for the restaurant industry. Analysts have pegged virtual restaurants in general and branded virtual restaurants, particularly as one of the most significant growth areas in the coming years.
Join Grubhub today to try one of our exclusive branded virtual restaurants or test a new menu concept with your own virtual restaurant concept!