 to start a business in 2020. What business would you like to start? We're gonna talk today about dark kitchens. If you're a food service enthusiast and want to start a food business then dark kitchens is really the place you should be looking at. You could call it a ghost kitchen, a cloud kitchen, a dark kitchen. There are various names for it but essentially it implies that you are going to deliver food to the customer and not really be serving the customer in a certain place. So what does the dark kitchen business model look like and why it's become so popular? One of the biggest reasons is because it is a much cheaper infrastructure, a much cheaper model than a restaurant is and therefore much more easier to start and get and make money out of. So let me tell you today how can you start a dark kitchen business? What kind of investments it will take and really what kind of ROI can you look at? So to start a cloud kitchen business or a dark kitchen business, firstly you will have to rent or lease a certain place. Typically the rental if you are going away in a far off area in a metro city it can cost you anywhere between 15,000 rupees to 30,000 rupees. If you're in a smaller city this cost can of course come down to another rupees 10,000. The area typically for a dark kitchen can be somewhere between 800 to 1,000 square feet. You would of course need more licenses as you go and start a dark kitchen business and they can put you out by about another 20,000 rupees. Considering that you know customers need to know more about your business in order to order from you so you'll have to be at a marketing cost. Now this marketing cost can be up to 30,000 rupees a month mostly digital, Facebook, Instagram or Google perhaps where you would like to market it. You would have to invest significantly in kitchen equipment which I feel is one of the biggest expenses in the whole thing. It can be anywhere from rupees 200,000 to 250,000 rupees or even more but I would suggest that you should have a mix of new equipment as well as second-hand equipment that goes in it in order to make it more economical for you to start. Then of course you can also have a software that you would need which could be a POS or some other kind of sales software. It will put you down to another rupees 20 to 25,000. You know when you are in the delivery in the initial stages you would not want to invest in your own fleet so therefore you are most likely to rely on third-party aggregators as a matter or Swiggy, Uber Eats or many other platforms that exist today. You know and they typically charge you anywhere between 20 to 30 percent commission which will again be looked at as a logistic cost or a delivery cost for reaching out to the customer for you. Another monumental cost that you're going to have in this whole system is a staff cost which will typically be rupees 75,000 to 1 lakh rupees a month. It will include your ship and your utility staff which would probably be a consistent cost for you as you go along and then there would of course be more miscellaneous costs maybe up to 50,000 rupees. This is what the total investment cost of setting up a cloud kitchen is but just in case if you don't want to go through the hassle of setting up the entire dark kitchen business model what you can alternatively do is get into more of a plug and play model where the kitchen is already set up and all you really have to do is go there with your staff and get started on making the food and delivering your orders. This is more commonly referred to as the CAS model which is kitchen as a service business model today. Now let me come to the more interesting part of the cloud kitchen business which is the revenues. You have to be able to build a sustainable business in the very first three months in order to make sure that the sustainability of your business is very long for the years to come. Now how will that happen? Immediately you have to get into a board wherein you should be able to get at least 8,200 orders daily. This could be coming from third-party apps like Zomato Swiggy or others but at the same time it is also advisable that you set up your own app or website through which customers can come and order from you directly and you can actually have a subscription kind of a business model which could help you to get more regular solid customer base which will make sure that your orders are coming on more consistent basis. The third kind of model that you should look at for earning revenues is with corporate tie-ups wherein you can actually look at for corporates around your area and you could be supplying in bulk to them and also you should take over party and catering kind of orders which will help you make some big money coming from your kitchen. They could be home chefs, women who are already cooking at home or men who are already cooking at home and would like to see now building an independent business out of it. Restaurants today can think of going omni-channel to set up a central kitchen apart from the restaurant kitchen that they have to which they can service all kind of delivery orders and also of course food service enthusiasts people who want to start a food service business. That's what the business model really looks like but really it's up to you as an entrepreneur to make it more successful by really being more hands-on. So one question that I'm often asked today is are dark kitchens going to replace the restaurants? Well one simple answer is they are not because dark kitchen and restaurants are absolutely different business models and dark kitchens most likely by their very way of working are looking to more replace the home kitchens instead of the restaurant. They are aiming to provide you with good economical and diverse meals at the right cost to make sure that you don't want to feel the need to cook at home but if they're going to are they going to replace the restaurants I really don't think so not at least in the coming few years. So you can rest assured that these two business models have nothing to do with each other. Well that's just about it. I hope you are able to start your dark kitchens business as soon as possible. Of course in the meantime you can glow a lot more about dark kitchens on our website www.entrepreneur.com