Saw this twitter thread about “Clout” Kitchens
and how celebrities and influencers will start leveraging their brand into food products. Would Love your opinion on this.
"“CLOUT KITCHENS: WHAT it is…HOW it works…and HOW MUCH $$$ they make
A lot of people have heard of Cloud Kitchens (a restaurant with no storefront. They ONLY do delivery via doordash, uber eats etc.)
That’s a cloud kitchen… So what’s a ‘clout kitchen’?
It’s a cloud kitchen - branded with an influencer who has clout… hence, a clout kitchen.
The best example? 3 weeks ago when
MrBeast
came out with MrBeast Burger and it became the #1 app on the app store, and got slammed with so many deliveries it was 2-3 hour delays.
background - MrBeast is a youtuber with ~50m youtube subscribers (aka, a sh*t ton)
He rolled out his own branded restaurant in ~300 cities overnight, with a simple menu of branded burgers, fries & shakes.
How did he do it?
He partnered with Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), the brainchild of Robert Earl (ceo of planet hollywood).
They license influencer brands, and create virtual restaurants
For example:
- Mariah Carey’s Cookies
- Mario Lopez Tortas
- Paulie D’s Subs
…and now Mr Beast’s Burger
VDC goes into cities and partners with restaurants that have extra capacity (that’s most restaurants nowadays).
They send them branded packaging. So to a customer, it looks like MrBeast sent them a burger. But the food is made by a local burger joint.
This is a win-win.
Celebrity gets to roll out 200-300 locations, overnight
Restaurants get extra orders & extra $$ (helpful during covid) that they can fill using staff + ingredients they already have.
I asked a friend in the industry to walk me through the economics. This isn’t specific to this deal, but here’s a back of the envelope calculation of how much a clout kitchen can make [[Image in Comments]]
Spoiler - the celebrity can make ~$10-20k per day in profit share
The math is very rough, and some assumptions are off.
But ball park I think it’s right.
With each restaurant only doing 40-60 orders per day over a 10 hour window…and multiply it by 200-300 locations… that’s a lotta cheddar
This isn’t the first time celebs slap their name on a commodity product.
Alochol → Ryan Gosling (gin), Conor McGregor (whiskey), LeBron James (tequila)
Makeup → Rihanna (fenty), Kylie Jenner
And this won’t be the last… but it is a new way to turn fame into fortune.
The next pizza hut won’t be brick and mortar, it’ll be in the cloud.
And it’ll probably be influencer branded.
Every day
David Portnoy - El Presidente
doesn’t launch “One Bite Pizza” is another day he puts off a $50M+ payday.”"
Via Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) on twitter
x.com
