Corby Kummer: Ghost kitchen services are "very bad deals for restaurants"

Travis Kalanick — the co-founder and ex-CEO of Uber who stepped down from the rideshare company — is bringing his new “ghost kitchen” company to Boston.

CloudKitchen, which buys old warehouse buildings to split into commercial kitchen spaces that restaurants can rent out to produce food for third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and GrubHub, is headed to Roxbury’s Shirley Street. The Roxbury warehouse will have more than two dozen kitchen spaces available for rent by both local restaurants and national chains. And though the company assures restaurateurs that profits will soar, critics aren’t so keen.

“There's huge amount of turnover in these places. The companies don't help [small businesses] out financially, and leave them hanging when they don't get sufficient orders,” food writer Corby Kummer said. “They're very bad deals for restaurants.”

Tech companies like CloudKitchen, Kummer notes, are “almost certainly going to want to own everything,” such as menus and access to recipes.

“The fact is, the tech company owns everything and all the intellectual property,” Kummer said. “You leave with nothing if it's not working out for you.”

Kummer is the executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.