001. fast(er) food

Yet, despite this new source of e-commerce demand, restaurants have struggled to keep up. The dominant reason is that restaurant demand is inherently “peaky.” It’s even more peaky now that delivery and pick up are turning restaurants into omni-channel retailers. Restaurants have fixed labor costs that do not scale up or down with volatile demand th... See more

As we saw with Mr Beast’s launch of his restaurant chain, delivery platforms and ghost kitchens are opening up the restaurant business. The rise of UGC games such as Roblox and Minecraft is opening up the games industry, with influencers like Preston Arsement driving millions of dollars with minimal overhead.

But CloudKitchens is struggling to overcome early challenges, limiting how much it can take advantage of the crisis, at least in the U.S. Certain properties it has bought have turned out to be in worse shape than anticipated, making some of them unusable and sharply raising the costs of renovating others, say people with knowledge of the problems.