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21 Apr 2026 Cheeky Pint The economics and trends of the restaurant industry, with Tony Xu of DoorDash
“I think because of that, it's a tricky model to scale to every type of restaurant brand.”
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- 21 Apr 2026
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- Cheeky Pint
Transcript context
…Is another way of putting it that it's hard for a ghost kitchen to be as efficient as a restaurant that is also churning out orders across both in-restaurant and delivery? It's just hard for them to compete on the economics? Yeah, it's slightly different. Perhaps we can look at two types of examples. You can have one type of example, which is perhaps my mom's Chinese restaurant. It's an SMB where the name value outside of literally its locale isn't that well known. It's very difficult for that restaurant to acquire enough customers to make that math work because they still have to… Remember, I mentioned that staffing was the number one challenge that restaurants face. They still have to staff these kitchens. That's one of the challenges. You go all the way to the other side. Pretend you are a large QSR with a big brand presence. You certainly can attract lots of customers, but you're going to have to think for yourself, "What's my opportunity cost?" My opportunity cost might be to open up another restaurant. Why not do that and take my economies of scale and actually apply it to more orders, in-store orders as well as to-go orders? Because I can do that with a restaurant. Hard to do that with a delivery-only kitchen. I think because of that, it's a tricky model to scale to every type of restaurant brand. I think people maybe thought that big chains were going to do it more, where you're right, the billboard effect for an actual retail presence is hard to compete with, where you get this very cheap customer acquisition from the fact that people know your name from the high street or maybe have been to you, and as a ghost kitchen, you need to make up for that awareness gap. But if you're Chipotle, maybe people thought that the orders get fulfilled out of a dedicated Chipotle central factory, and then the retail space are separate. But also that hasn't really happened that much.…
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