Back in 2015, a few scrappy teams started asking a radical question: what if you could run a restaurant without the restaurant? No lease, no dining room, no waitstaff, just a kitchen, an app, and a delivery driver.
It wasn’t a gimmick. It was the beginning of the virtual kitchen era.
Fast forward to today, and “ghost kitchens” have become one of the biggest shifts in food service since the drive-thru. Companies like CloudKitchens, Kitchen United, and Keatz aren’t just operating kitchens, they’re rebuilding the backend of the entire delivery economy. Whether you’re ordering Nashville hot chicken or Korean tacos, there’s a good chance your meal came from a kitchen you’ve never seen and never will.
But what separates hype from long-term infrastructure? And which virtual restaurant concepts are actually winning, financially, operationally, and culturally?
This article traces the rise of virtual kitchens from early experiments to scalable platforms. We’ll explore the big bets (like CloudKitchens and REEF), the clever hybrids (like Junzi and Wow Bao), and the real-world implications for how food brands test, launch, and expand in 2025.
Forget the hype. These five virtual restaurant brands didn’t just chase a trend – they executed with clarity, focus, and serious business sense. Whether you're a POS integrator, tech partner, or just watching the space evolve, these are the names worth paying attention to.
1. It’s Just Wings – Chili’s (Brinker International)
Formula: Use what you already have
Launched in mid-2020, It’s Just Wings became a textbook case in low-effort, high-reward innovation. The menu? Only wings. The setup? Mostly existing kitchen equipment, with just a few new fridges.
As Brinker’s CEO Wyman Roberts put it:
“For the sales volume that it generates, it’s really capital-free.”
The brand leveraged Chili’s nationwide footprint without opening a single new locationб and quickly scaled to $150M+ in annualized sales.
Why it matters: This is how enterprise brands quietly add new revenue streams without disrupting core ops.
2. The Burger Den & The Meltdown – Denny’s
Formula: Stick to what you do best
Denny’s didn’t reinvent the wheel, they just sliced the menu two ways. One brand for burgers (The Burger Den), another for hot sandwiches (The Meltdown). No major ingredient changes, no new SKUs, no new staff training.
As their VP of Product Innovation Sharon Lykins said:
“We’re going to stay in the things we know we can deliver well.”
Why it matters: Not every virtual brand needs to be flashy, some just need to be operationally clean and delivery-friendly.
3. Guy Fieri’s Flavortown Kitchen
Formula: National delivery, powered by personality
Celebrity chef Guy Fieri launched Flavortown Kitchen in early 2021 – a delivery-only brand that runs out of host kitchens across dozens of cities. The menu plays to his signature style: bold flavors, hearty portions, and zero pretension.
Built in partnership with Virtual Dining Concepts, it scaled fast by using underutilized kitchens and cloud infrastructure.
Why it matters: A media brand + ghost kitchen = national scale, no leases required.
4. HotBox by Wiz – Wiz Khalifa
Formula: Niche branding done right
This isn't just a celebrity vanity project. HotBox by Wiz delivers stoner comfort food, burgers with hot Cheeto dust, mac & cheese, sweet potato tots, all themed around the rapper’s laid-back persona.
The food matches the brand, and the brand matches the audience.
Why it matters: It’s a lesson in serving a specific audience with voice, consistency, and zero dilution.
5. CloudKitchens
Formula: The infrastructure behind the curtain
Founded by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, CloudKitchens doesn’t sell food, it sells the rails to deliver it. With over $500M in revenue by 2024, it provides modular kitchen spaces, ops support, and integrated logistics tools for virtual brands.
It’s not a restaurant brand. It’s the AWS of food delivery.
Why it matters: While everyone else was launching menus, CloudKitchens built the real estate and tech stack to support the entire category.
Let me know if you'd like a follow-up post with tags and LinkedIn-friendly formatting for these five, or if you'd like a Part 2 with the best ghost kitchen platforms like Kitchen United, REEF, and Deliveroo Editions.
It’s easy to talk about virtual brands in the abstract. Most headlines focus on celebrity-backed launches, 8-figure valuations, or ghost kitchen platforms raising capital faster than they raise spatulas. But beneath the top layer of buzz, there are stories like Ricky Lopez’s, and they tell us far more about where this industry is really headed.
Ricky Lopez isn’t a tech founder or a TikTok-famous chef. He’s a 26-year-old operator in San Francisco who runs Top Round Roast Beef, a physical location in the Mission District. But most nights around 9:30 p.m., something interesting happens: the dining room closes… and the ghost kitchens come alive.
From that same space, Lopez also runs three other brands:
- Red Ribbon Fried Chicken
- TR Burgers and Wings
- Ice Cream Custard
None of them exist in the real world. There’s no signage. No website. No Google Maps listing. These restaurants live entirely inside the Uber Eats app. Their only storefront is a mobile phone screen.
“Delivery used to be maybe a quarter of my business,” Lopez told The New York Times. “Now it’s about 75 percent.”
Turning Data Into Concepts
What sparked the shift wasn’t a business plan or a round of funding, it was a conversation. Uber Eats approached Lopez with data: in his neighborhood, late-night demand for burgers and dessert was going unmet. He already had the ingredients and the kitchen. So why not try?
Instead of reworking Top Round’s brand, he launched entirely new virtual concepts, built around what he was already cooking. TR Burgers used the same beef patties. Ice Cream Custard came from his existing dessert line. The change required almost no new equipment, no new staff, and no marketing budget. Just new names, menus, and listings.
This is the virtual restaurant model at its most elegant: demand-led, asset-light, and extremely responsive.
“We used to close at 9 p.m., but now we close at 2 a.m.,” Lopez said. “Most of the night, the kitchen is banging.”
Why This Isn’t Just a Fluke
Lopez’s story may seem anecdotal, but it’s quietly becoming the blueprint for a new class of restaurant entrepreneurs – those who build horizontally, not vertically. Instead of expanding physical locations, they multiply concepts. Instead of hiring servers, they optimize SKUs.
In fact, this is exactly the type of behavior that platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash are trying to encourage. Uber alone has helped launch over 4,000 virtual restaurants since 2017, often using internal sales data to nudge operators toward launching specific concepts in response to local demand gaps.
In that sense, ghost kitchens aren’t just a new business model – they’re a new form of algorithmic entrepreneurship. Food meets data. The operator becomes the executor of insights delivered by platforms that have visibility into every click, search, and order.
The Risks: Commission Cuts and Disappearing Margins
Of course, this model comes with tradeoffs. Third-party platforms charge restaurants commissions ranging from 15% to 30% per order. While delivery-only restaurants can save on rent and front-of-house staff, they’re also locked into ecosystems that don’t always share power evenly.
As one longtime pizzeria owner in San Francisco put it:
“We saw a direct correlation between the delivery services and the reduction of our income. It was like death by a thousand cuts.”
Some restaurateurs find that while delivery boosts volume, it erodes profitability, especially if they previously had loyal customers who now order through apps, adding a layer of fees that didn’t exist before. In worst-case scenarios, operators become trapped in low-margin business models, where they carry all the operational risk but cede customer data, pricing control, and discovery to third-party platforms.
But for entrepreneurs like Lopez, the benefits still outweigh the costs. Delivery transformed his restaurant from a financial drain into a stable operation. It let him reduce his hours (from 110 per week to something survivable), hire additional staff, and stay open past midnight all without signing a single new lease.
The Big Picture: Platforms Are Becoming Incubators
Uber Eats and its competitors are no longer just marketplaces. They’re evolving into restaurant incubators, analyzing neighborhood-level demand and nudging supply in that direction. A few years ago, a restaurateur might’ve opened a new location to test a concept. Today, they launch a new brand overnight and test it through Uber’s backend.
This gives platforms immense power: they decide what demand matters, what cuisine gaps exist, and which partners get access to that data. But it also creates new opportunities for agile operators willing to iterate, pivot, and build for a world where foot traffic is replaced by algorithmic visibility.
And as cases like Lopez’s show, the restaurant of the future may not be a room with tables. It might just be a screen, a chef, and a data set.
Want to build your own virtual brand or help restaurants launch one? That’s where companies like KitchenHub come in, with ready-to-use integrations, order sync, and white-label tools that let you move from concept to launch in weeks, not months.
