Category: Tech

Food Rocket, the virtual restaurant start-up founded by Italian entrepreneur Dario Scattarelli, has secured an $8 million pre-money valuation and is gaining the attention of investment and venture capital firms. The company specializes in managing and creating restaurant brands exclusively for home delivery, and has developed a successful business model that includes partnering with existing restaurants to use their kitchens as production points, analyzing data to identify market trends and consumer preferences, and marketing and promotion through digital channels.

Food Rocket is currently in talks with Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Accel Partners for a $2 million Series A funding round, in exchange for a 20% stake in the company. The delivery market in the United States is expected to grow to $70 billion by 2023, and Food Rocket aims to capitalize on this trend by expanding its presence in the virtual restaurant industry. With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the shift to e-commerce, there is a rising demand for home-delivered products, and Food Rocket is well-positioned to provide a wide range of food options to consumers.

As technology continues to play a crucial role in the delivery market’s growth, Food Rocket remains committed to enhancing the efficiency of its operations by exploring new automated delivery solutions such as drones, robots, and autonomous vehicles.

Dario Scattarelli is thrilled to have attracted investment and venture capital funding and says that the additional resources will enable Food Rocket to continue innovating and expanding its presence in the virtual restaurant industry.

Uber Eats is taking steps to eliminate low-quality listings by removing certain delivery-only restaurants from its app. This move was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by the company to The Verge. To achieve this goal, the company is implementing a new set of standards for virtual restaurants that will help reduce the number of listings that have similar menus.

Virtual restaurants, also known as ghost kitchens, are restaurants that do not have a physical location where customers can dine in. They operate exclusively on delivery apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash and are often located within existing restaurants, warehouses, or even parking lots. Some of these restaurants are independent, while others belong to larger companies that franchise their brand to multiple operators, such as MrBeast Burger. Uber also offers a virtual restaurant program that helps entrepreneurs start their own ghost kitchens.

However, because some of these ghost kitchens are run by the same company and sometimes located in the same place, it can lead to repetitive listings with different branding but identical menus. Uber Eats is cracking down on these redundant listings by requiring virtual restaurants to have menu items that are at least 60% different from any other virtual restaurants operating in the same physical location. The same rule applies to the parent restaurant or kitchen that houses the virtual brands.

Additionally, Uber will now require the ghost kitchen and its parent restaurant to maintain a 4.3-star rating or higher on the app, have 5 percent or fewer orders that they have canceled, and have a 5 percent or lower inaccurate orders rate. Uber notes that it “reserves the right to remove VRs from the Uber Platforms that are not in compliance.”

As noted by the Journal, Uber Eats is removing around 5,000 virtual kitchens from the app in violation of this policy, including 14 virtual brands selling the same menu out of a deli in New York City. That’s just a small fraction of the number of ghost kitchens available on Uber Eats. There are currently a total of around 40,000 virtual listings on Uber Eats — a steep increase from the 10,000 on the app in 2021 — and they make up about 8 percent of all the restaurants listed there in the US and Canada, according to the Journal.