Skift Take
The pandemic has produced unlikely partnerships between the hotel and office sectors, but the longevity is up for debate. The ghost kitchen pairing between hotels and an outside food operator may actually stick for years to come, as it solves a pre-pandemic revenue loss problem.
Hotel room revenues may have tanked during the coronavirus pandemic, but some leading operators in the industry hope underutilized kitchens can pave the way for future profits.
Even before the pandemic depleted hotels of high occupancy rates and coveted business like corporate travel and conventions, full-service hotel owners struggled with food and beverage programs generally operating at a loss. While necessary for amenities like room service, on-site restaurants were often scaled back to generally operate on limited hours or even just for breakfast to stop some of the financial bleeding.
Those underutilized spaces now may become a rare segment of profitability while the global hotel industry lumbers along an uncharted pandemic recovery path.
“It’s about understanding what the need is and understanding that hotels and their kitchen infrastructure sits around great communities that need great food,” said Sam Nazarian, the SBE founder who now owns the C3 food and beverage platform company. “You can really unlock the value of that kitchen in addition to providing a branded, in-room product.”
After selling his remaining half of SBE’s hotel business to Accor last year, Nazarian is focusing on C3, which stands for Creating Culinary Communities. A rapidly growing component of C3 is its ghost kitchen business, which operates multiple food brands for delivery from
