Guides
Ghost kitchen business plan: a fill-in outline
A ghost kitchen business plan outline: nine sections covering menu-test evidence, radius demand, platform terms, operations, compliance, funding and growth.
What to take away
- A ghost kitchen plan is read by a facility operator, a lender, or a partner who wants to know one thing: does the per-order arithmetic survive the platform commission. Lead with that.
- Every section below names the evidence it should contain. A section with a claim and no evidence is a section the reader skips.
- The menu section is a bag-test report, not a list of dishes.
- The market section is a radius, a density of orders inside it, and who already serves them, not a national growth figure.
- Keep the plan short and the appendix longstatements, quotes, and the health authority's written answers go in the back.
A business plan for a delivery-only kitchen differs from a restaurant plan. The location and dining experience, where a restaurant plan spends most pages, barely exist here.
What replaces them is arithmetic about a platform taking its share before you see the money, plus evidence the food survives the trip. Below is a nine-section fill-in outline: it identifies what to gather and where to enter your own platform terms, local requirements, costs, and operating evidence; it does not supply universal figures.
Section by section
1. The concept, one page
State the food, the meal occasions, the container, the radius, and the kitchen model (hourly commissary, shared facility bay, host restaurant hours, or own space). A reader should be able to picture the order arriving. Say what you decline: no catering, no breakfast, whatever you will not do in year one.
2. Menu and bag-test results
List each dish with its shipping container and the result of a sealed transit test at the longest expected delivery time. Include what you cut and why. This section is the single most convincing thing a ghost kitchen plan can hold, because almost no plan has it.
3. The market, defined as a radius
Give the delivery circle and what is inside it: residential density, offices, campus, late-night traffic. List listings there already serving similar food.
If you have run hourly-kitchen weeks, put order counts by hour. If not, say so and describe the test you will run. The startup and market guide explains why the radius, not the city, is the market.
4. Platform economics
For each platform you intend to list on, state your commission tier and per-order fee under its current terms.
Then show the per-order arithmetic for a typical order and your smallest: price, less commission and fee, less food, packaging, and labor minutes.
Name your own ordering channel and its cost to run.
5. Operations
Describe the kitchen model and what the facility's approvals cover versus what remains with you. Describe the tablet flow at peak: who accepts, who packs, who hands off to drivers. Describe the packaging checklist. Reference the site's step-by-step guide to opening for the launch sequence rather than repeating it here.
6. Regulatory dependencies
List each authority, what it requires, its status, and its date. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's directory of state retail food codes and agencies is how you identify the food authority; the licensing and compliance guide on this site lists the other layers. Attach the health department's written answers in the appendix.
7. Team
Name who runs the pass at peak, who owns the tablets, and who covers when they cannot. Write the first two roles as scorecards, using the hiring and training guide as the model, rather than as job titles. A reader wants to know the kitchen can run on a Friday night without you.
8. Startup uses and funding
Separate one-time items (equipment, deposits, smallwares, first packaging order, listing photography) from monthly commitments (kitchen hours or bay license, software, insurance). Separate both from working capital for weeks between paying suppliers and receiving platform payouts. State how each is funded.
The Internal Revenue Service's Starting a Business pages cover the entity and tax setup a lender will expect done.
9. Growth path and stop rule
Say what triggers the next step (a second platform, a wider radius, a second brand sharing the prep list, a bay instead of hours) and what ends the experiment. The expansion and market guide covers the growth decisions; the stop rule belongs here, in writing, because a reader who sees one trusts the rest of the plan more.
What goes in the appendix
- Platform statements from any test weeks, showing gross, commission, fees, and refunds.
- The bag-test log with dates and containers.
- Written answers from the health authority and from the facility operator on what their approvals cover.
- Supplier quotes for the first packaging and food orders.
- Compare the plan with the Small Business Administration's Business Guide to spot gaps in general planning, launch, management, and growth topics; use it as a gap check, not as a template for food-specific sections.
What a reader looks for first
A facility operator reads section 5 to see whether you understand their approvals and their peak. A lender reads section 4 and section 8 to see whether the commission leaves anything and whether working capital covers the payout lag.
What each reader checks
- Facility operator reads section 5
- Lender reads sections 4 and 8
- Partner or investor reads section 2
A partner or investor reads section 2, because it shows you tested the one thing most applicants have only imagined. Write for those three readers, in that order, and keep everything else short.
Common questions
How long should the plan be?
Short enough that the per-order arithmetic is on page two. Ten pages of body with a long appendix is a reasonable shape; forty pages of narrative is a plan nobody reads.
Do I need real platform statements before writing it?
No, but a plan with them is in a different class from one without. Even two weeks of hourly-kitchen receipts turn the platform economics section from a model into evidence.
What if I have not chosen a kitchen model yet?
Write section 1 with the model you will test first, and section 9 with the trigger for moving to the next. A plan that admits the first model is a test reads as more honest than one that pretends the lease is signed.
Should the plan include a national market size?
No. A delivery kitchen sells inside a radius. A figure for the whole country tells the reader nothing about the orders available inside yours.
