All restaurants, especially cloud kitchens, can benefit from third-party and marketplace orders. These orders come from the giant online restaurants such as Doordask, Grubhub, Ubereats.

They charge huge commission fees and advertising costs to place your restaurant on top of customer searches. This investment can be worthwhile if you know how to optimize the arrangements.

Sign up with the big 4

Contrary to traditional wisdom, the first order of the day is to sign up with the big 4: Doordash, Grubhub, Postmates and Ubereats. Don’t be too concerned with the high commissions. Consider them the costs of marketing and customer acquisition (more on this later).

Create more concepts

In cloud kitchen language, a concept equals a name and a menu. Creating more concepts means doing business under different names and menus. Your existing menu can be split into smaller menus by category or food types, for example. 

In the online food service business, everything is different from the brick-and-mortar restaurant common knowledge. Online customers have no interest in your dine-in setup, printed menu layouts, or even your hospitality (you can change this later).

The more concepts you have, the more your foods will be exposed to customers when they search for their favorite dishes on the third-party platforms. 

Consolidate all concepts in the kitchen to maximize efficiency

Obviously in a cloud kitchen space is a premium. You can’t have multiple tablets or printers going for the multiple concepts. Some cloud kitchens have over 20 concepts. It is crucial to have all orders come into one tablet or kitchen display system (KDS) and manage everything from it.

Once you have created multiple concepts, or online brands, the next step is to build each brand in the customer’s mind and give them a reason to order directly from you.