A video from MrBeast, a 22-year-old YouTube star with 54 million subscribers, usually looks like this: A fancy setup – for example, staging a fake robbery – results in a fan winning thousands of dollars or a new car. But in late December, MrBeast (real name: Jimmy Donaldson, an upbeat brother from North Carolina) dropped something else for his viewers.
“I literally just opened 300 restaurants across America,” he said in a video in December announcing MrBeast Burger, a chain that serves burgers and fries. “But we only serve people via delivery apps.”
But MrBeast Burger isn’t quite what most of us consider a chain or even a restaurant. In return for a cut in sales, the brand provides each restaurant owner with the name, logo, menu, recipes, and promotional images with the space and staff to cook burgers as a sideline. When a customer orders from MrBeast Burger in Midvale, Utah, the food is prepared at a location of the red sauce chain Buca di Beppo according to a standardized MrBeast recipe. In Manhattan, a MrBeast burger is being prepared in the neighborhood bar Handcraft Kitchen & Cocktails.
Let’s call it a Ghost franchise – and expect many more with and without celebrity names this year.
In December, Virtual Dining Concepts, the company behind MrBeast Burger, announced similar ventures with TV personality Mario Lopez and Jersey Shore alumnus Pauly D.
Another pioneer of the model, Nextbite’s parent company received $ 120 million in venture capital for its 13 virtual brands in October. Founded last year, Franklin Junction helps restaurants do business as well-known food brands including Wow Bao and Nathan’s Famous. Companies like Future Foods, Combo Kitchen, and The Local Culinary all make similar pieces.
In the era of delivery apps, the Ghost franchise can be a lifeline for the independent restaurateur, making thousands of dollars a month in a devastating time. It can also be a liability that explodes the market in a way that serves big brands more than small businesses.
James Garofalo, 52, grew up in his father’s diner in Chicago Heights, Illinois. He is now the Chief Operating Officer of Goddess and the Baker, a multi-location coffee shop in Chicago and one in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Garofalo was skeptical of the Ghost franchise model. But when the pandemic disrupted pedestrian traffic, he decided it might make sense. “At this point you are looking for ways to generate dollars and keep people busy,” he added.
Mr. Garofalo now runs 12 of Nextbite’s Ghost franchises from the kitchen of his Brookfield Cafe: Monster Mac, Big Melt, Grilled Cheese Society, Miss Mazys Amazin ‘Chicken, Toss It Up, CraveBurger, Outlaw Burger, Ghost Grille and Firebelly Wings, Wild Wild Wings, the Wing Dynasty and HotBox from Wiz, from rapper Wiz Khalifa.
Everyday life is less chaotic than it sounds. Orders for delivery apps are transferred to a tablet and the take-out bins are all from the same stack. nothing is branded except HotBox orders, and these only have a sticker. Nextbite’s Colorado test kitchen recipes are easy to follow, and the company recommends ingredients from suppliers that Mr. Garofalo already uses. Nextbite reduces sales by 45 percent, but handles all delivery app fees, which for Mr. Garofalo would be up to 30 percent per order. In his best month to date, he cleared $ 20,000 for the 12 brands.
The agreement has allowed Mr. Garofalo to add new types of food without the hassle of menu development or the worry of confusing his own brand. But what restaurant owners really buy from these companies isn’t just recipes or a cute name. You are buying a solution to a problem every small restaurant faces that comes up by all other names on one screen than name on one screen: visibility.
“Before Covid, you had a few restaurants that didn’t need to be installed on these third-party systems,” said Kymme Williams-Davis, the owner of Bushwick Grind, a Brooklyn coffee shop. “But now every restaurant, every café, every commercial kitchen and every ghost kitchen is included in these apps. It’s more competitive. “If someone searches for espresso on their Grubhub block, Bushwick Grind is buried under more than 20 stores, some of which are miles away.
The business model depends on the deals the Ghost franchise parents do with third-party delivery apps (which are known to take advantage of workers and restaurants). The lever is used to have hundreds of listable “restaurants” in order to convey top spots for them search results. When a customer in the Brookfield area searches for grilled cheese on DoorDash, the Grilled Cheese Society is their first suggestion. In Search of Wings, Firebelly is third and Wild Wild Wings is fourth.
“Like everyone else, we pay for app usage and placement,” said Geoff Madding, CEO of Nextbite. He added, “The more value you bring, the stronger your negotiating position is likely to be.”
In January, Ms. Williams-Davis began selling online as Mariah’s Cookies, Virtual Dining Concepts’ branding partnership with singer Mariah Carey, to see if the additional sales could help Bushwick Grind “stay alive at this truly unprecedented time “. “She said. It had to close for six months last year, she said, after her father and some of his cousins died of Covid-19.
Your cafe is an example of a community-based business. She runs a community refrigerator, feeds vaccine workers, and plans to open a city farm.
“I don’t want to help stop buying locals, do I?” She said. “In a way, when you shop at Mariahs Cookies, you buy local products and that name and this ad machine can get customers because I make the cookies. At the same time, the perception is that you are not buying locally. I’m on the fence. But when it comes to hurting small businesses, I won’t keep doing that. “
Nationwide more than 150 MrBeast Burgers work at locations in Buca di Beppo, Bravo! Italian cuisine, Brio Italian Grille and Bertucci’s Brick Oven Pizza & Pasta. These four restaurant chains are owned and operated by Robert Earl, the founder of Planet Hollywood. Virtual Dining Concepts, which operates MrBeast Burger, was co-founded by Mr. Earl and his son Robbie Earl.
Similarly, many of Franklin Junction’s ghost franchises are operated from a Frisch’s Big Boy, a chain of Franklin Junction’s parent company NRD Capital, a private equity firm.
But even an independent restaurant can get a virtual brand up and running in less than 30 days, with a limited number of brands an owner can adopt. And that potential speed of diffusion could lead to a delivery app ecosystem where the Ghost franchise parent companies are at the top, while the truly independent restaurants are lower down the list.
This is already happening in New York City. If you’ve noticed the stream of confusing restaurant names in delivery apps, many of which are confusingly similar, this, too, is a manifestation of the Ghost franchise.
When Jacky Cheng, a resident of Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, ordered the Village Breakfast Snob on DoorDash, “I couldn’t really think of it as a ghost kitchen,” he said. “Though it should have been, because who the hell calls your restaurant that?”
The food, he later found out, came from an East Village bodega that operates as at least 10 ghost brands, including LA Breakfast Club and American Cheesesteaks. In New York there is now the Pancake Snob, the Breakfast Burrito Snob, the Sushi Snob, the Pad Thai Snob, the Chicken Tikka Snob and the Snobby Chicken Wings. There’s also the Burger Bae and Breakfast Be Loved.
The style of these names creates a marketplace that is in some ways comparable to Amazon, said Lea Chu, group director of naming at branding strategy firm Siegel & Gale. You have a need – there a hole punch; There’s a breakfast burrito here – and a hyper-specific listing to fill it up.
Seven years ago, Ms. Chu researched the name of every restaurant in Manhattan, a project that lasted weeks. Restaurant owners usually want names that won’t sound silly in a year, she said. This is less important here.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Ms. Chu said. “Your name is becoming irrelevant and you have to change it? It probably doesn’t matter. There are so many fluctuations in this restaurant landscape that everyone will be used to the fact that the names keep changing. “
Right now we seem to be entering a period when every “Bachelorette” candidate for the past 18 years will have a virtual deli. Marios Tortas Lopez and Pauly D’s Italian Subs are listed in dozens of markets. At least 130 branches of Guy Fieri’s first virtual brand, Flavortown Kitchen, have opened since January. And MrBeast Burger has already spread to Canada. A fan base of 54 million YouTube subscribers sold a lot of sandwiches – more than a million in the first two months.
“My son is 18 years old, my daughter is 14 years old, and they think MrBeast is funny,” said Cece Kaufman, an interior designer in San Francisco.
In December, the family went on a so-called “road trip”, which Ms. Kaufman happily referred to as a “road trip” – a 40-minute drive to the delivery zone of the nearest MrBeast burger to find a DoorDash driver with three Smash burgers and two fries. To take orders. The teenagers, like most of the customers in the ghost kitchen, had no idea where the food was made.
“They didn’t care,” said Ms. Kaufman. “The packaging had the MrBeast stickers, so they thought it was great.”
