. SEEDTABLE

January 17th, 2020 | #58

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This Week in Europe: Dark kitchens and the default path

“Imagine the most profitable restaurant in your city has no tables, no chairs, and no patrons. Chances are you just pictured the future of dining.”

That’s the first line of , one of my favorite editions back in April 2019. Things have changed quite a bit since then. And last week, Sifted published a comprehensive report on one of the hottest markets right now – The future of on-demand food delivery.

Food delivery plays a sizeable role in European tech, with household names like Glovo, Wolt and Delivery Hero. It accounts for 4.6% of the total capital invested in Europe in 2019 – €1.6 billion out of the €34.3 billion.

European startups in the on-demand food sector. Source: Sifted

The report outlines three predictions that they believe will play out over the coming years (and a bunch of puns):

• Dark kitchens are going to be big

• Brands are going to go at it alone

• On-demand grocery is going to get interesting

The report is fantastic – European tech has been craving quality content for a while – but overly bullyish. I guess that’s what you get when you ask the Head of Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Uber Eats about the future of his industry. I tend to disagree a bit, and think we’ll see some consolidation in the space.

But there’s one thing I think they got right – dark kitchens.

Welcome to the world of dark kitchens

Here’s how I described dark kitchens in :

"A cloud kitchen is a food venue that doesn't have a location for pickup or seated venue and are offered exclusively through food marketplaces."

Back then my point was a potential winner could be the infrastructure layer that powered the entire industry – the AWS for dark kitchens.

My point holds. But I think I was missing a bigger one: the combination of food delivery apps and dark kitchens can kill home cooking and change the way we consume food.

Food delivery apps can integrate vertically and control production on top of the already existing