Guides
A Framework for Evaluating a Ghost Kitchen Location
A ghost kitchen location depends on delivery range, demand by hour, driver availability, building requirements, occupancy costs, and commitment level.
What to take away
- Start by defining the delivery area your menu can tolerate, then compare buildings inside it. The address still has to pass the building and cost checks.
- Test packaged food to set the transit boundary; check demand at intended hours and whether drivers serve the address at peak.
- Visibility and walk-in traffic usually matter less than loading access, driver pickup, ventilation, and permitted use.
- Facility types differ in commitment and in which approvals they cover. Move from lower to higher commitment only after each test passes.
- This guide gives a sequence for evaluating candidate sites; local demand, written costs, and approvals determine whether a particular address works.
Site selection for a restaurant is about who walks past. Site selection for a ghost kitchen is about who orders within a delivery window your menu can tolerate, whether the food survives the trip, and whether a driver will take the order at all. That inversion makes most retail-location advice useless here.
The decision starts with the delivery area and proceeds through demand, facility commitment, building readiness, and full occupancy cost. Use the checks below in that order; a site should not advance to a more expensive commitment until it passes the prior gate.
Define the site at the right scale
Draw three circles on a map around any candidate building.
Three Circles Define the Site
- Transit circle: how far food survives
- Demand circle: who orders like yours
- Driver circle: where drivers actually serve
- Site is the overlap of all three
- The transit circletest representative menu items in the packaging and handoff setup you expect to use. Take them over candidate routes under conditions relevant to your planned hours; record route time and whether each item still meets your quality standard. Map only routes that pass.
- The demand circlethe area inside the transit circle where people order food like yours at your hours. Residential density, offices, campus, late-night traffic, and what already competes there are useful context, but check actual listings and sales evidence too.
- The driver circlethe area delivery apps serve from your address at your peak. Check service coverage and observe pickup activity. Where drivers are scarce, orders sit at the pass and cool, whatever the map says.
The site is the overlap of the three. A building with a perfect kitchen outside that overlap is the wrong building.
Measure demand by hour, not by population
Population figures describe who lives somewhere, while delivery demand is who orders and when.
Demand Test in Three Moves
- Read platforms in radius at intended hours
- Check listings, ratings, quoted times, busy marks
- Rent kitchen hours nearby if possible
- Sell for two weeks and read real orders
Before committing anywhere, spend a week checking DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, or the other services you plan to use in the candidate radius at your intended hours. Record how many listings are in your category, how ratings run, what delivery times are quoted, and whether listings are marked busy at peak. Treat these as signals, not a substitute for sales evidence.
Then rent kitchen hours nearby if possible and sell for two weeks. Real orders by hour are the only demand evidence.
Facility types compared
Commitment
- Hourly commissary
- Hours booked
- Bay in a shared-kitchen facility
- Monthly license
- Hours in an existing restaurant
- Agreement with the host
- Your own space
- Lease plus buildout
Approvals
- Hourly commissary
- Facility holds building approvals; operator status confirmed with the health authority
- Bay in a shared-kitchen facility
- Facility building approvals; operator permit often yours
- Hours in an existing restaurant
- Host's approvals; your status to confirm
- Your own space
- All yours
Fit for
- Hourly commissary
- The demand test
- Bay in a shared-kitchen facility
- A proven brand needing its own line
- Hours in an existing restaurant
- A second brand from idle equipment
- Your own space
- Multiple proven brands
Watch for
- Hourly commissary
- Peak slots sold out; your gear in and out
- Bay in a shared-kitchen facility
- Facility fees on top of platform commission; shared driver pickup
- Hours in an existing restaurant
- Host's service comes first; storage disputes
- Your own space
- Buildout time; every fixed cost alone
The order is the order of commitment. The licensing and compliance guide explains why "who holds which approval" is a written question to the health authority for each facility type. The FDA's directory of state retail food codes and agencies helps you find the authority for a candidate address. The FDA Food Code is a model code; the applicable code and permit requirements depend on the state and local jurisdiction. Ask the responsible agency which permit, plan review, inspection, and approval sequence applies, how long it currently takes, and which obligations fall to the facility versus the operator. Get the answers in writing before signing.
What the building must actually have
- Permitted use for food preparation, confirmed with the local building or planning department, not inferred from the last tenant.
- Ventilation, fire suppression, and grease handling adequate for your cooking method; frying needs what a salad kitchen does not.
- Utilities sized for your equipment, with the cost of upgrades quoted before signing.
- Loading and driver accesswhere a driver parks, how far they walk, whether the pickup point works at night.
- Cold and dry storage that holds a week's delivery.
- Waste and grease disposal arrangements the facility or landlord will put in writing.
- Accessibility at any customer-facing point. The U.S. Department of Justice's ADA guide for small businesses explains what an existing facility owes the public, including barrier removal where readily achievable, and a pickup window counts.
The people constraint on the site
A site is only open when someone can staff it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' profile of food service managers describes schedules with nights, weekends, and holidays. Delivery peaks fall exactly there.
A site hard to reach after midnight, or with no safe staff parking, loses the people who make the late peak possible. Include transit and parking for staff in the site score.
Occupancy cost belongs in the per-order arithmetic
Rent, facility fees, utilities, and insurance are fixed costs. Per-order contribution must cover them after the platform's commission comes off gross.
The lease article in this cluster works through full occupancy cost in named variables; the startup and market guide sets out the per-order arithmetic it feeds into. A site where contribution cannot cover fixed cost at a realistic peak is too expensive, however good the kitchen.
The menu decides the site as much as the reverse
Frying, wood-fired cooking, and heavy grease need ventilation and suppression that some bays cannot provide. Cold-chain products need freezer capacity. Group drops need staging space. The products and packages guide covers formats; the site rule is that the format list is fixed before the site visit, so the visit checks the building against it.
Observe the site under real conditions
A daytime visit with a broker shows you a kitchen. It does not show you the site. Go back alone at your intended peak, on a weekend night if that is when you will sell, and watch for an hour.
Count drivers arriving for other operators in the building. Time the walk from where they park to the door. See whether the door is lit and signed, whether the pickup point is staffed or self-serve, and how long bags wait on the shelf.
Check phone signal inside the bay, because tablets that drop offline at peak lose orders. Then drive representative transit routes at the hours you plan to sell, record elapsed times, and compare the results with the routes that passed your sealed-food test. A site that passes the daytime visit and fails the night visit is a failed site.
The handoff point is part of the kitchen
In a dine-in restaurant the pass ends at the server. In a ghost kitchen it ends at a shelf where a driver picks up a sealed bag. That shelf is where cold food, wrong bags, and missing orders happen.
Look at how the facility handles it. Are bags labeled and sorted by platform? Can drivers reach the shelf without entering the cooking area? Is there hot-holding for the minutes an order waits? Who is responsible when a driver takes the wrong bag?
A facility with a well-run handoff point is worth more than one with a better stove, because the handoff is where ratings are lost.
Phasing the commitment
- Firsthourly commissary inside the best-overlap radius, for the demand test.
- Secondonly when contribution per order from real statements covers a bay's fixed cost, a bay in that radius or one adjacent to it.
- Thirdonly when multiple brands are stable and the constraint is the bay itself, a space of your own.
Write the gate for each step before taking the first. The Small Business Administration's Business Guide covers choosing a business location among its launch topics; it is oriented to customer-facing premises, so read it for the general lease and permit questions and use this page for the delivery-specific ones.
Common questions
Is a cheap industrial unit a good ghost kitchen site?
If it sits inside the overlap of the three circles, has permitted use and ventilation, and drivers will serve it at night, yes. If it is cheap because it is outside the driver circle, no.
How wide should the radius be?
Set the boundary at the farthest routes where your packaged food still meets its quality standard under representative conditions. Keep the radius within areas that also show demand and driver coverage; extend it only after testing the added area.
Does being near other ghost kitchens help or hurt?
Shared facilities cluster kitchens, and driver supply tends to follow. Competition on the same platform in the same radius is the cost; measure both before deciding.
Can I choose a site before I have a menu?
You can, but the site will then choose the menu for you, through its ventilation and storage. Fix the format list first.
