The 'Windowless Production Kitchens' Behind Your Online Food Order

As online food ordering becomes more popular, a new restaurant trend is popping up to deal with the demand: ghost kitchens, or production centers to handle delivery orders only, with no store front at all.

Food writer Corby Kummer joined Boston Public Radio on Monday to discuss the trend, first adopted by restaurants, which is now expanding into the food delivery apps themselves.

"The idea is, you save a lot of money if you don’t have to rent a store front location and you don’t have to have your own staff doing delivery. So Seamless and Doordash are starting their own ghost kitchens. What are these? They're windowless production kitchens ... you can't order takeout, you can't go in, they're only to fulfill online orders."

For example, Doordash has partnered with various restaurant chains to open a shared kitchen, to be a one-stop production kitchen for multiple brands that deliver through the app.

"You order something, it has a separate brand identity online, that's the only brand identity it has, because it's online only. It's the same staff reaching for a different set of spice bottles, often they share the same raw ingredients," said Kummer. "It's kind of as soulless and mechanical as it sounds."

Corby Kummer is 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