The dark kitchen market | France

1.1 Definition and scope of the study

The market of "ghost kitchens", or more commonly called "dark kitchens", concerns food providers essentially turned towards the sale of home-delivered dishes. Unlike traditional restaurants, it is impossible to order and take your meal on site. The order is done on online applications such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo, etc. These kinds of  brands are essentially virtual in that they are impossible to access. Dark kitchens offer all types of cuisine, from sushi to burgers, as well as French specialties and foreign cuisines.

The global dark kitchens market is a very dynamic segment of the restaurant market, as in 2019 it represented 5% of the commercial restaurant industry. Some dark kitchens markets are more mature than others such as the Chinese or Indian market, where there are 7,500 Chinese dark kitchens and 3,500 Indian dark kitchens in the world.

The number of dark kitchens players keeps increasing year after year, so much so that some experts believe that the market will soon be saturated. In France alone, by the end of 2020, there were already more than 1,500 dark kitchens on the Uber Eats app and more than 500 on the Deliveroo app. This is why more and more dark kitchens companies are now turning to the franchise business model. These companies support new players who want to enter the home-delivered food business.

As for the French dark kitchens market, it is still growing with, in 2020, a 50% increase in the number of dark kitchens on the Uber Eats app compared to 2019. This market dynamic has obviously been boosted by the health crisis since in 2020, it was almost impossible to go have lunch or dinner in a restaurant. Fundraising to support the development of these new ghost kitchens is increasingly recurrent, like Not So Dark, which raised 20 million euros in 2020 to develop its dark kitchens before then changing the business model to franchising.