Source: Instagram

If you were one of the handful of New Yorkers to order from Rachael Ray’s delivery-only restaurant on UberEats featuring recipes from her latest cookbook, there’s a chance your meal was cooked inside of a windowless trailer pictured above. These kitchens are part of a larger network operated by a company called REEF Technology, a new unicorn startup backed with $800mm-$1bn of debt and equity from SoftBank’s Vision Fund and the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund.

Urban industrialists are looking at the future of cities and asking: what happens to parking lots when we have shared autonomous vehicles? Today, the best answer seems to be to turn them into sites for delivery-only modular kitchens.

Both CloudKitchens and REEF are taking separate approaches towards capitalizing on this opportunity. REEF’s stated mission is to “transform parking facilities into multipurpose hubs for the on-demand economy.” It claims that one day, these hubs could house everything from bike/scooter rentals to electric vehicle charging stations to designated rideshare pickup areas. Today, it is starting with REEF KITCHENS, a network of kitchen trailers that sit on top of existing parking spaces with hopes of improving net operating income for parking lot owners. The premise is comparable to UK-based Deliveroo’s Editions, which partners with restaurateurs to operate prefabricated kitchens in urban areas with unmet supply of delivery options. The company received $575mm from Amazon earlier this year.

Deliveroo’s Editions under a railway line in East London, 2017 (Source: The Guardian)

Unlike CloudKitchens, which purchases parking garages and warehouses to build out its CloudKitchen hubs, REEF does not own the dirt beneath its modular kitchens. Rather, it has used its funds to roll up parking lot management companies like Impark and Owl Rock, layering on its monetization technology like pay-by-app or license plate scanning to improve efficiency. The company is now the largest parking lot operator in North America, boasting inventory of 1.3 million spaces across 4,500 locations.

In October, REEF gained more press for providing the kitchen infrastructure and operations for Rachael Ray’s virtual restaurant popup collaboration with Uber Eats in addition to three other in-house brands: Wings & Things, Burger Bytes, and American Eclectic Burger. Hungry to learn more, I looked up the addresses for its two NYC-based sites in Manhattan and Long Island City and decided to pay a visit before the popup ends this year.

REEF Kitchen site in Chelsea, Manhattan

The first stop was to an Impark site located in Chelsea at 41 W 17th St. The trailer was branded to draw attention, but like many other virtual concepts, I was not met with much enthusiasm when I approached its window, asking to place a pickup order. Sandwiching the trailer is a dumpster with a sign that reads “food pick up here” on one side and a lone bench on the other. The trailer occupies the space of roughly four traditional parking spaces.