Capacity planning
Delivery keeps growing and the kitchen stays the same size. There are two honest answers - sweat the kitchen you have, or add capacity - and the expensive mistake is drifting between them without deciding. Here is the comparison, with the numbers that frame it.
Capacity planning
Delivery keeps growing while the kitchen stays the same size. UK restaurant delivery took 13.8 pence of every pound spent with restaurants in January 2026, with like-for-like delivery sales up 7.4% on the year, and the wider delivery market is forecast to reach about 14.8 billion pounds this year. For an operator riding that curve there are only two honest answers: sweat the kitchen you have, or add capacity. Both are right in different situations, and the expensive mistake is drifting between them without deciding.
The pressure rarely announces itself as a capacity problem. It shows up as prep running later, the pass jamming at the delivery peak, courier wait times creeping, and platform ratings sliding on the nights you are busiest. By the time the symptom is visible on the apps, the kitchen has usually been over its comfortable throughput for months - which is exactly when a rushed expansion decision gets made badly.
Option one
Most kitchens have more throughput in them than their busiest night suggests, because the constraint is almost never the building - it is one station, one machine or one habit. Finding it is unglamorous work: time the delivery peak, watch where tickets queue, and follow the longest wait to its source. A menu engineered for delivery does more for capacity than any appliance: fewer components, more make-ahead, dishes that share stations rather than fight for the same fryer. Batching, holding done right, and a dedicated packing bench that keeps couriers away from the pass all buy real volume for hundreds of pounds rather than tens of thousands. Working out how many covers one kitchen can genuinely handle is the arithmetic to do before any cheque gets written.
Sweating also has a hard edge worth respecting: extraction, refrigeration and drainage were sized for a duty, and stacking a delivery business on top of a full dine-in service pushes all three past it. A cookline run harder produces more grease, more heat and more moisture per week - the infrastructure bill for higher throughput arrives whether or not the walls move.
Option two
Expansion buys throughput, but on delivery economics the margin maths deserves cold eyes first. Full-service platform commissions typically run 25-35% for independents, and delivery can already be 30-50% of revenue for some operators - so a new unit built to serve growth pays its rent, its fit-out and its commission out of the same order value. That is why the honest expansion for many delivery businesses is not a second restaurant but a production unit or dark kitchen: cheaper space, built around throughput rather than atmosphere, and judged purely on the economics of cooking without a dining room.
Whatever form it takes, a new space is also a new compliance footprint: registration with the local authority at least 28 days before trading, its own extraction and cleaning regime, and its own inspection. And a second site does not halve the pressure on the first - it splits the menu, the team and the manager, which is why the strongest expansions happen after the original kitchen has been systemised, not instead of systemising it. If a surge has already arrived, there is a playbook for absorbing a sudden doubling of delivery orders that buys the time to decide properly.
The decision
Questions
Time the delivery peak and watch where tickets queue. If waits trace back to one station or one machine night after night, you have a bottleneck, not a capacity ceiling - fix that first. If the whole line is saturated at peak, prep runs late however early it starts, and courier waits creep on every busy night, the kitchen itself is the constraint.
Usually, because you pay for throughput rather than atmosphere: lower rent, no front of house, and a layout built around packing and dispatch. The trade-off is that the unit lives or dies on delivery economics alone - platform commissions of 25-35% for full-service listings come off every order, so the margin model needs to work before the lease is signed.
Infrastructure duty. More cooking hours mean more grease in the extract system, more heat for refrigeration to fight and more load on drainage - all sized for the old volume. TR19 Grease cleaning intervals are set by daily cooking hours, so a kitchen that doubles its output usually needs its extraction cleaned on a shorter cycle, and a new site needs local authority registration at least 28 days before trading.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
TR19 Grease cleaning intervals follow the hours you actually cook. Extraction cleaned and certificated to the duty your delivery volume now runs.