> Quality control became impossible. Shared kitchen facilities meant that one staff member prepared food for multiple brands simultaneously. No ownership. No accountability. Just assembly-line cooking with zero connection to customers. When food arrived cold or wrong, customers had no relationship with the brand to forgive mistakes. No loyal regulars. No servers to smooth over problems. Just angry reviews that destroyed virtual brands forever. No reason for repeat business.

That's a straight quality control problem. It ought to be solveable.

But that's hard to do.

The trouble is, the whole food app industry is based on someone else dealing with the hard problems. The drivers aren't employees, and the restaurants aren't employees. If an app company gets into ghost kitchens, they are now in a business where they are clueless. Some try to avoid being responsible for the food by just being landlords for people who buy a station in the kitchen

Bulk food prep is a solved problem. Every major hotel has it solved. There will be some senior people who went to a serious culinary academy. They look at food prep as a manufacturing problem, with batch quantity optimization, holding time limits, error tolerances on temperatures and quantities, and quality control points. It's factory planning.

The first "Doordash Kitchen", in Silicon Valley, is near me. It's still operating, but I don't see many drivers there.

> When food travels twenty minutes in a bag, quality suffers.

You'd think that would be a solved problem in packaging and prep by now. Insulated containers are not rocket science.

> Insulated containers are not rocket science.

You often want the opposite of insulation. Food continues to cook in the container, things get soggy, etc. Each dish and even ingredient can have different ideal packaging requirements. It's not something that really scales well. It's part of why menus like McDonalds' remained stable and relatively small over a period of decades. Notice how their fries are served in a specialty designed container that's open, which avoids them becoming soggy.