One kitchen.
Four brands.
No dining room.
Akontec builds delivery-only kitchens in the USA and UK for owners living somewhere else. We find the site, specify and install the equipment, clear the permits, and launch the brands — then run the platforms, the orders and the back office from India.
On a typical delivery order, before rent, staff and equipment. This is the arithmetic the whole venture lives or dies on — so we put it on the front page rather than at the end of a proposal.
Indicative ranges, not a quotation. Actual figures depend on menu, city, platform mix and negotiated rates.
Commissary bay to own unit
One line, one rota, four listings
Site search to first order
Platform desk, orders and reviews
A kitchen with no dining room.
No front of house, no waiters, no seating, no expensive high street frontage. Orders arrive from delivery apps, food is cooked, packed and handed to a rider. The capital goes into the cooking line, not into decor.
Rent is a fraction of a restaurant's
You need a compliant kitchen with good rider access, not a corner site with footfall. That single change is what makes the model work at all.
No front-of-house payroll
No waiters, hosts or bar staff. The team is kitchen only, which is a much smaller and more predictable wage bill.
Demand comes from the apps
You are not waiting for someone to walk past. You are competing for position in a search result, which is a different discipline and one that can be managed remotely.
You can test a menu in a week
A new brand is a new listing, not a new building. If it does not sell you change it, which is impossible with a fitted-out restaurant.
One equipped line.
Several brands on it.
Rent, extraction, equipment and the kitchen rota are largely fixed the day you open. Running one brand off that means one listing carrying all of it. Running four means the same fixed cost spread across four listings in four different search categories.
This is the whole argument for buying the equipment. It is also why we lead with it rather than treating it as an upgrade you buy later.
Grill & burgers
South Asian curry house
Rice bowls & wraps
Late-night snacks
Four brands only work if the menus share ingredients and equipment. Four unrelated cuisines off one line is three kitchens pretending to be one, and it shows up in ticket times and waste. We design the brand set around a single prep list.
Where the kitchen actually sits.
All three are equipped kitchens you own the output of. They differ in who owns the building services, how fast you open, and how much capital goes into the fabric rather than the cooking line.
Commissary bay
You licence a bay inside a purpose-built ghost kitchen site. Extraction, grease interceptor, fire suppression, drainage and rider handover are already installed and already compliant. You fit your own cooking line, refrigeration and prep.
Multi-brand kitchen
A bay or unit equipped deliberately to carry three or four delivery brands off one line and one rota. Menus engineered around a shared prep list so the extra brands add revenue without adding much cost.
Own production kitchen
Lease a shell and fit it out completely — extraction to roof level, fire suppression, drainage, the lot. Lowest running cost per order once open, and the longest, most expensive and riskiest build.
In a shell fit-out, extraction and ventilation is usually the single largest cost, and it is not equipment. Canopy, ductwork to roof level, make-up air and a fire suppression system over the cooking line frequently cost more than every appliance combined — and the flue needs landlord consent and, in the UK, often planning permission. It is the main reason we point first-time owners at a commissary bay.
What actually goes in.
Specified against the menu, not bought from a catalogue. Get this wrong and you either cannot cook the menu at volume, or you have paid for a machine that sits unused.
| Group | What it covers | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Extraction & suppression | Canopy, ductwork to roof, make-up air, fire suppression over the line | Largest line in a shell fit-out. Consent and often planning needed |
| Cooking line | Ranges and burners, fryers, griddle or char-grill, combi or convection oven, tandoor where the menu needs it | Sized to peak-hour ticket volume, not to the menu length |
| Refrigeration | Walk-in or reach-in cold and freezer, undercounter prep fridges | Undersized cold storage forces daily deliveries and raises food cost |
| Prep & storage | Stainless benches, shelving, dry store | Prep space is what makes multi-brand possible |
| Sinks | Three-compartment wash, separate hand wash, mop sink | Specified by the health authority, not by preference |
| Warewashing | Dishwasher and pot sink | Undersized here and service stops mid-peak |
| Grease interceptor | Sized and sited to the authority's requirement | A permit condition. Retrofitting is expensive |
| Holding & packing | Hot holding cabinets, heat sealers, labelling, the packing station | Decides whether food arrives intact. Directly drives ratings |
| Technology | POS, kitchen display screens, order aggregator across platforms | Without an aggregator, three platforms means three tablets and typing errors |
Gas supply capacity, three-phase power, water heater sizing and drainage all have to support the line you specify. A shell that looks cheap often is not, because upgrading the incoming supply is a utility company job on a utility company timeline. We check capacity before you sign anything.
Food is local. Screens are remote.
That is the whole division of labour, and it is why this works with an owner overseas. Anything that touches food happens in the kitchen. Anything that happens on a screen happens at our desk.
The kitchen
- Head chef or kitchen manager — the key hire, and effectively runs the site
- Line cooks, scaled to order volume
- A packer during peak service
- The named person responsible for food safety, usually the head chef
- Opening and closing checks, temperature and waste logs, deliveries in
- Cook, pack, seal, label, hand to the rider
Someone must physically cook. This is the venture where remote ownership strains hardest, and the kitchen payroll is fixed against variable orders. We cost it into the plan from month one rather than letting you discover it at launch.
The platform desk
- Live order monitoring, so an unaccepted order is caught before it auto-cancels
- Item availability switched off across every platform the moment the kitchen flags a shortage
- Menus, photography, descriptions and pricing across all brands
- Every review answered, and complaint patterns fed back to the kitchen
- Refund and chargeback disputes with the platforms — a running battle that is worth real money
- Promotion scheduling and ad spend, measured rather than left running
- Supplier ordering coordinated against stock and forecast
- Compliance calendar and monthly reporting
A good head chef runs a kitchen well. Almost no head chef will sit answering reviews on four apps at 11pm, chase a platform for a refund credit, or notice that one brand's conversion dropped after a photo change. That is desk work, and it is what we already do for a living.
We earn when
you earn.
Three components, and you will know all three before we send a proposal.
- Setup fee — a percentage of establishment cost, quoted once site type and brand set are fixed. Equipment purchase is excluded from the base.
- Management fee — a flat monthly amount covering the platform desk and back office.
- Profit share — a percentage of net operating profit above an agreed threshold, on a defined expense schedule.
A fee on your equipment would point us the wrong way.
Paid a percentage of what you spend, we would earn more by specifying a bigger cooking line than your menu needs, and a shell fit-out over a commissary bay. That is exactly the incentive we have designed out.
Taking a share of operating profit puts us on the same side. When we tell you the combi oven is unnecessary or that a bay beats a build, it is because we think it makes you money.
The profit share is a contractual right under a management agreement. It is not equity. We take no interest in your company or your equipment, and we have no claim on a sale. Fixed term, with exit rights both ways.
Four checks that decide whether a site is usable.
A kitchen site is not judged on rent. It is judged on whether it can legally and physically do what you need. All four happen before you commit.
Permits & use class
Health department permit, food business registration, planning or zoning for commercial food production, and whether delivery-only use is permitted at that address.
Extraction route
Whether a flue can physically reach roof level, whether the landlord will consent, and whether planning permission is needed. This kills more sites than rent does.
Utility capacity
Gas supply, three-phase power, water heating and drainage sized for the line you intend to install. Upgrades run on the utility company's timetable.
Access & the lease
Rider access and waiting, delivery access for suppliers, waste and grease collection, permitted hours, and whether the lease allows food production at all.
If any of the four fails, we say so and the site is dropped — and you have spent nothing beyond the engagement fee. Permits here are physical: an officer walks through the kitchen and, in the UK, publishes a hygiene rating that customers can see. That cannot be guaranteed by anyone, and we will not pretend otherwise.
The four that come up every time.
The full list runs to twenty-five, grouped by topic.
Can I really own this from India?
Yes, and the platform side genuinely runs from a desk. But be clear about the split: cooking, packing, cleaning and food safety are physical and local. You will employ a head chef and kitchen staff, and a named person responsible for food safety has to be on the premises. That payroll is fixed from month one. Of the four ventures we build, this is the one with the largest local footprint.
Isn't the platform commission too high to make money?
It is the central problem of the sector and it is why so many ghost kitchens fail. It is survivable with menu engineering for margin rather than for variety, several brands spreading the fixed cost, tight food cost control, and a deliberate push toward direct ordering. It is not survivable if you copy a restaurant menu onto an app and hope. We model your specific menu before you commit.
What if the head chef leaves?
Then the kitchen stops, which is why we treat it as the main operational risk rather than a footnote. The mitigations are a deputy hired early, recipes and processes documented so the business is not inside one person's head, and a relationship with a local agency before you need it.
How long until the first order?
A commissary bay is fastest because the building services already exist and are already compliant. A shell fit-out is much longer, and the timeline is set by extraction works, utility upgrades and the inspection queue rather than by us. We give a dated stage plan at proposal and mark every dependency we do not control.
See whether the numbers work in your city
A 45-minute consultation covering site type, brand strategy, equipment budget and the permit position where you want to operate. No obligation.