Ghost kitchens have been helping out many a restaurant during the pandemic. These are kitchens — often without a storefront or public face — that make the food you’re taking out from your favorite restaurant.  

Atul Sood is the Chief Business Officer at Kitchen United, a venture-backed startup that is deploying “ghost kitchens” to help restaurant brands serve their customers without necessarily having a storefront or physical restaurant. He knows his way around food delivery partnerships: He was the Director of Business Development for McDonald’s Global Digital organization.

Some ghost kitchens have names you know — they’re the outsourced takeout division of your neighborhood place. Others exist only as ghost kitchens — they are not attached to a physical restaurant at all.

Ghost kitchens were around before the pandemic and they will be around afterward. Just as chefs used to try out their ideas in food trucks that went from neighborhood to neighborhood, restauranteurs with experience and those new to the game are using ghost kitchens to test their culinary ideas on the public.  It could be that your favorite restaurant of the future may not have a physical location that you can visit. It will be an entirely take-out experience.