C2 THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, MARCH 14, 2021
‘GHOST KITCHEN’
Red Robin, masquerading as separate restaurants, highlights fears over dine-in’s future
BY JAMIE GOLDBERG
The Oregonian
M
olly Jewkes came across a
new restaurant prominently
featured on Postmates while
scrolling through the food delivery
app last month.
She decided to order dinner from
the restaurant, Chicken Sammy’s,
thinking she was supporting a local
Portland business.
But her chicken sandwich arrived
in a red container with utensils from
Red Robin. A sticker with a picture
of a chicken was affixed to the plastic
bag the food came in.
“It made me feel like I was duped
into buying something that wasn’t
what I thought it was,” said Jew-
kes, 29. “Red Robin is a big national
chain. I don’t know why they would
be advertising their food as differ-
ent restaurants other than to confuse
people.”
What Jewkes was ordering from
was Red Robin’s version of a “ghost
kitchen.”
Ghost kitchens began popping up
before the coronavirus pandemic
with startups like REEF Technology
and CloudKitchens offering a de-
livery-only model where the same
kitchen staff cook food from multiple
brands out of one small space or food
cart trailer.
The concept has exploded during
the pandemic because it offers a way
for brands to offer food for delivery
without the overhead costs of oper-
ating a full restaurant space. Market
research firm Euromonitor believes
ghost kitchens could be a $1 trillion
industry worldwide by 2030.
Portlanders were introduced to the
ghost kitchen model last April when
celebrity chef David Chang’s fried
chicken chain, Fuku, began showing
up on food delivery apps in the Port-
land area. It turned out that Chang’s
company hadn’t expanded to Port-
land, but had licensed the right to
sell its chicken sandwiches to REEF
Technology.
The move was met with a wave of
criticism from local chefs who felt
Barb Gonzalez
Bombay Bend Indian street food has fresh ingredients and robust flavors and it’s
made in one of Central Oregon’s ghost kitchens.
the national chain was profiting off
the pandemic while local businesses
were struggling to stay afloat. That
prompted Fuku to pause the rollout,
but it didn’t stop ghost kitchens from
taking hold in Portland.
There are numerous ghost kitch-
ens advertising their delivery-only
food in Portland on Postmates,
DoorDash, Grubhub and other de-
livery apps. It’s often very hard to dis-
tinguish between those brands and
the local brick-and-mortar restau-
rants that use the same online deliv-
ery services. DoorDash labels virtual
brands, but it takes some scrolling to
find those labels. Other apps don’t
have any labeling that distinguishes
ghost kitchens from local restaurants.
What Red Robin is doing, though,
is a progression of the ghost kitchen
model that makes it especially chal-
lenging for consumers to tell who is
actually selling the food.
Red Robin is a publicly traded
restaurant chain based in Colorado
with 570 locations nationwide. It re-
ported nearly $870 million in reve-
nue last year.
The company operates three ghost
brands — Chicken Sammy’s, The
Wing Dept. and Fresh Set — out of
restaurants across the Portland area
and throughout the country.
Those brands appear on multiple
delivery apps and have their own lo-
gos, but outside of the branding there
is nothing to distinguish them from
Red Robin. They offer virtually the
same menus and have the same ad-
dresses as any other Red Robin.
But at first glance, a customer
would be unlikely to recognize that
the brands are just offshoots of the
national chain.
A Red Robin spokesperson asked
for written questions but then didn’t
respond to those inquiries. Marc
Burrow, a New York-based art direc-
tor who said he designed The Wing
Dept. logo, didn’t respond to a re-
quest for comment but removed a
webpage discussing his ghost kitchen
concept for Red Robin a day after an
email inquiry.
“There are questions about truth
in advertising,” said Kurt Huffman,
the owner of ChefStable, one of Port-
land’s most prominent restaurant
groups. “Are you just selling us Red
Robin, but with four different labels
on it? To me, that is what they’re do-
ing. There’s nothing substantively dif-
ferent about the different brands they
are selling. There’s no personality to
it, there’s nothing that differentiates it
in any real way.”
ChefStable is among a handful of
local businesses that have gotten into
the ghost kitchen game over the last
several months in an attempt to sur-
vive the pandemic and push back
against what they see as sterile con-
cepts and brands being offered by na-
tional ghost kitchen operators.
After catering business plummeted
due to the pandemic, ChefStable
Catering was left with little use for
its 3,000-square-foot commercial
kitchen. In December, the group
transformed the kitchen into Chef-
Stable Kitchen Collective, a virtual
food hall where six different menus
are prepared in the same space for
delivery on the same ticket.
Unlike other ghost kitchen oper-
ators, the collective presents all six
menus under the same banner on de-
livery apps such as Postmates, Door-
Dash and Grubhub, offering the con-
cepts as different sections of a menu.
All six menus were designed by lo-
cal chefs who work together in the
kitchen to cook the food for delivery.
Huffman sees the virtual kitchen
as a place where those chefs can test
run menus with the long-term goal
of opening brick-and-mortar restau-
rants, if customers respond to the
concepts.
However, he said he hopes the
ghost kitchen model is not here to
stay. For him, it’s a temporary mea-
sure that enables ChefStable to get
through the pandemic.
“Personally, I hope it all crashes
into a fiery abyss,” Huffman said.
“I think it’s a race to the bottom in
terms of the quality of the product if
you are really looking at this as the
future. If this takes hold, it will be
fascinating to see how independent
restaurant owners can differentiate
themselves in a space that’s really
built for conglomerates.”
Diane Lam has spent the last few
months working on a concept to try
to compete with the out-of-town cor-
porations and national chains that
have come to dominate the takeout
scene with their ghost kitchens.
“It disgusts me,” Lam said. “They
are trying to saturate the algorithms
so that way when you’re looking at
these sites, you’re seeing five of the
same product from one location in
the same pool as one restaurant with
one page.”
The ghost kitchen model itself
doesn’t necessarily bother Chris Cha.
Cha’s Hawaiian restaurant Smokin’
Fire Fish was touted as one of the
best new restaurants in Portland
when it opened in 2019, but the
restaurant struggled once the pan-
demic hit.
Cha was in the process of closing
the restaurant for good and selling
off his equipment when Jaime Soltero
Jr., the owner of Tamale Boy, offered
to rent him space in his restaurant’s
North Russell Street kitchen.
By taking advantage of the shared
kitchen model championed by ghost
kitchen operators, Cha was able to
limit overhead costs and get by with
just one part-time staff member. The
setup enabled him to survive while
offering only takeout and delivery di-
rectly through his website. He credits
Soltero with saving his business, and
the two restaurant owners are now
thinking of partnering on a new ven-
ture in Beaverton.
Cha said he doesn’t fault any com-
pany or corporation for trying to do
what it takes to stay afloat during the
pandemic, even if that means em-
bracing the ghost kitchen model. But
he also said consumers have the right
to know where their food is coming
from.
“Those restaurants could be go-
ing out of business themselves, even
if they are a corporate entity,” Cha
said. “It would rub me the wrong
way, though, if they are trying to pass
themselves off as a local restaurant.
It’s kind of sketchy if they are using
this as an advertising tool to make it
seem like they are something they’re
not.”
Growers’ coolers do double duty for tree seedlings
BY CRAIG REED
For the Capital Press
ROSEBURG — Not long af-
ter the coolers are emptied of
summer and fall produce and
products, the cool space on
several farms becomes a transi-
tion home for seedling trees.
Those coolers are a stop be-
tween the nurseries of north-
ern Oregon and southern
Washington and the moun-
tainsides of the Coast Range
and the Cascade Mountains.
The digging and shipping
of the seedlings, the majority
of them Douglas fir, begins at
the nurseries in December. In
order to get the trees closer to
their future homes, they end
up at coolers at farms like Wes-
ley Orchards and Norris Blue-
berry Farms near Roseburg
and Fern Hill Holly Farm near
Astoria, Ore.
The coolers are kept at 34 to
38 degrees.
“It’s just more convenient
to have the trees at a central-
ized location,” said Ben Chris-
tiansen, a forester for Barnes
& Associates, a company that
manages 80,000 acres of south-
western Oregon timberland.
“Then we don’t have to drive
up to the nurseries every day.
Those nurseries don’t have the
storage space. Having these
farms with their coolers is con-
venient for us.”
Beginning in December and
then a couple times a week,
seedlings are delivered in bulk
by semi-truck and trailer to
the coolers. During a normal
planting season from Decem-
ber to April, the Norris coolers
store 1.5 million young trees
for five timber companies,
Wesley Orchards stores 1.5
million trees for five compa-
nies and a few smaller timber
owners, and Fern Holly stores
2.5 million trees for two com-
panies.
In the past, Kruse Farms of
Roseburg stored seedlings in
its cooler for a timber owner
until that company built its
own cooler. Evan Kruse said
the farm’s cooler is available to
storing seedlings.
“We want to provide a ser-
vice, help these timber com-
panies out and make it easier
for them to get the trees every
morning,” said Paul Norris,
owner of Norris Blueberry
Farms.
Norris said he was ap-
proached several years ago
about the use of the coolers.
“They came to me and said,
‘Hey, you’ve got coolers. Can
we use them?” Norris said.
While providing a service,
storing the seedlings is diver-
sity for the farms, earning rev-
enue and extending the use of
its facilities beyond the sum-
mer and fall harvest seasons.
“This keeps our cold storage
in operation, this utilizes our
building space that we have
during our off season,” said
Howard Sand, owner of Wesley
Orchards.
Charley Moyer, the Dillard
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District forester for Roseburg
Forest Products, said that com-
pany plants 500,000 to 1 mil-
lion seedlings a year. Most are
Douglas fir, but incense cedar,
grand fir and some other non-
fir trees are also planted.
Moyer said the seedlings can
be stored up to four weeks in
the cooler without being dam-
aged, but most of them are out
and in the ground within three
weeks.
“It’s a convenience thing for
the planting crews to have the
seedlings closer to where they
are going to be planted,” Moyer
said.
Between 5 and 6 each
morning, five to six days a
week, planting crews roll up
to the coolers and load 8,000
to 10,000 seedlings into their
trailers. They then head off to
the mountains for a one- to
two-hour trip to the planting
site. With a crew of 10 to 15
planters and on terrain that is
not too steep, the daily goal is
to plant all the seedlings taken
each morning.
Snow and below freezing
temperatures are the two main
factors that will stop the plant-
ing schedule.
The Wesley Orchards cooler
has stored seedlings for the
past 45 years. Sand said there
have been years when up to 5
million trees went through that
cooler. He said he expects the
number to be up in upcoming
years as the thousands of acres
of forest land that was burned
by the multiple fires of 2020 are
reforested.
Sand said he’s been told or-
ders for seedlings for each of
the next three years have al-
ready been placed by landown-
ers who sustained losses in the
131,542-acre Archie Creek Fire
that started last September east
of Roseburg.
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