Dark kitchens & delivery
Strip out the dining room and keep the difference, says the pitch. The ledger says the platforms, the postcode and the building were all there first.
The pitch and the ledger
Strip out the dining room, the waiters and the high-street rent, cook for delivery only, and keep the difference. That is the ghost kitchen pitch, and on a whiteboard it works. On a profit and loss statement it meets the platforms - and the platforms were on the whiteboard first.
None of what follows says the model cannot work. It can, and operators around the country make it work every week. But the ones who do have usually stopped believing three comfortable numbers: the headline commission rate, the menu price, and the rent per square foot. Each of them hides a second number underneath.
The first number
UK platform commission on full-service delivery - their riders, their app - typically runs between 25 and 35 per cent of order value for independents, with marketplace-only and self-delivery tiers down nearer 14 to 20 per cent. Those are the numbers everyone budgets with. The one they miss is VAT: commission is a service the platform sells you, so VAT lands on top of it, and a 25 per cent headline rate behaves like roughly 30 per cent of the order before you have paid for anything else. Refund deductions, promotional co-funding and paid placement come out of your side too, and since 2024 the platforms report your gross revenue directly to HMRC, so the ledger has to be right as well as merely survivable.
The strategic answer most operators land on is the same one: treat full-commission channels as paid customer acquisition rather than the business itself, and push repeat orders toward cheaper routes - self-delivery tiers, collection, or a direct channel - once a customer knows you exist. On a delivery-only site with no shopfront, that migration is harder than the consultants make it sound, which is precisely why the platforms price the way they do.
The second number
A dining room lets a kitchen charge for atmosphere, service and the evening itself. A delivery listing strips all of that away and ranks you in a grid next to every competitor in the radius, where price, photos and delivery time do the selling. The practical ceiling on your menu is set by the third-cheapest comparable dish on the platform, and the practical floor is set by your food cost plus the commission mathematics above. The space between those two lines is the entire business.
That is why successful delivery-only operators obsess over things that sound trivial: dishes engineered to travel without degrading, packaging that costs pence less per order, menu items culled the moment their contribution goes negative after commission, and average order value pushed up with bundles because the commission percentage is indifferent but the fixed costs per order are not. It is also why many run several virtual brands from one cookline - the same kitchen, the same stock, three listings in the grid instead of one. Done honestly it is a legitimate multiplier; done carelessly it multiplies complexity faster than revenue, a trade-off we examine in multiple brands on one cookline.
The third number
The rent per square foot on a dark kitchen unit looks wonderful next to the high street, and it is - because you are not renting a high street. What the headline rate quietly excludes is everything that makes the shell cook: extraction and gas infrastructure, utilities, waste, pest control and cleaning of shared areas, often bundled into service charges you do not control and cannot easily audit. Shared extraction systems in multi-tenant sites are a particular blind spot: the duty to keep them clean and safe is split between operator and landlord in ways the licence agreement decides, the grease your fryers send up the duct mingles with four other tenants' output, and the energy the strained fans burn comes back to everyone through the communal bill - mechanics we cover in how communal energy costs behave in dark kitchens.
Read the licence the way you would read a lease, because functionally it is one. Who cleans the extraction, to what standard, on what evidence? What exactly is inside the service charge, and what happened to it last year? What happens to your trading week when the operator schedules shared-system maintenance? The answers move real percentage points of margin, which in this model is most of the margin there is.
The honest model
Put the three honest numbers together and the viable shape emerges. Ghost kitchens work when volume is high enough to spread fixed costs, when the menu is engineered for travel and for margin after commission rather than for a food photographer, when at least a slice of demand arrives through channels cheaper than full commission, and when the operator treats the building's hidden costs as line items to manage rather than surprises to absorb. They struggle as a shortcut for a struggling restaurant, because the model removes the one advantage - the room - a restaurant has over every other listing in the grid.
And whatever the spreadsheet says, the kitchen is still a kitchen. Delivery menus lean hard on fryers and grills, which load extraction systems faster than the gentle averages assume; a heavy-use cookline sits on a roughly three-month cleaning cycle, and in a shared building your slot in that cycle is worth protecting.
Questions
Full-service delivery - the platform's riders and app - typically costs independent operators between 25 and 35 per cent of order value, while marketplace-only or self-delivery tiers run roughly 14 to 20 per cent. VAT is charged on top of the commission, so a 25 per cent headline behaves like about 30 per cent of the order. Refund deductions and promotional costs come out of the operator's side as well.
Cheaper per square foot, not automatically cheaper per pound of revenue. You save the dining room, front-of-house labour and high-street rent, but you hand a quarter to a third of every order to the platform, pay for delivery packaging on every sale, and carry service charges for the shared building. The model wins on volume and menu engineering, not on the rent saving alone.
The standard playbook: use full-commission listings as customer acquisition, then migrate repeat business to cheaper channels - self-delivery tiers where the commission drops sharply, collection orders, or a direct ordering route. Bundles and minimum order values raise average order size so fixed per-order costs shrink. Progress is slower for delivery-only sites than for restaurants with a shopfront, so plan the migration into the model from day one.
Whatever the licence agreement says - which is why it must be read like a lease. Typically each operator is responsible for their own canopy and local ductwork while the landlord maintains shared risers and fans, recovering costs through the service charge. Keep your own TR19 Grease certificates regardless: they are your evidence for insurers, the fire risk assessment and any dispute about whose grease is in the shared duct.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
TR19 Grease extraction cleans for delivery-only and multi-tenant kitchens, with the certificate your licence agreement expects.